Full Fathom Five
by Authoressinhiding
Summary: While the Winchesters wade through a morass of Lucifer, Nephilim, and rifts in the universe, a Slayer and her former ally realize the afterlife isn't all it's cracked up to be. And when desperate times call for even more desperate measures, Sam and Dean aren't the only ones willing to get their hands dirty. Three-quel to Synchronicity and Ramble On, picks up in SPN Season 12.
1. Prologue: The Road So Far

**Disclaimer: **Any recognizable character names, places, or plot points are the property of Warner Brothers, Eric Kripke, Joss Whedon, Dark Horse Comics, and assorted other entities. I'm just taking them out for (yet another) joyride.

**A/N:** Today is the fifth anniversary of when I first started publishing Synchronicity. Writing that story helped pull me through the most difficult patches of medical school. After finishing Cops and Robbers a few weeks ago, I found myself in a similar difficult patch in residency. And who should waltz in, demanding more screen time and arguing that they weren't quite finished yet, but Faith and Dean? At the risk of pulling a JK Rowling, here we go again.

This fic pics up after Ramble On, with a change in events that will be introduced in the next chapter. This Prologue is our very own The Road So Far montage, a quick clip show of the highs and lows of Sync/Ramble On, to get everyone caught back up. If you've read both fics recently, or if you'd rather just skip the clip show, the first proper chapter should be up sometime this weekend.

* * *

**May 2003, Los Angeles**

As the group of the newcomers strode in through the door, it was the last woman who really caught his attention. Somewhere in her early to mid-twenties, dark hair, dark eyes, heavy amounts of eyeliner and mascara, red lipstick, skintight clothes. She followed her friends into the bar, gave the room a bored once-over, and then ditched the group to head purposefully his way. She slid onto the barstool next to Dean and held out her hand. "Hi, I'm Faith."

"Dean." Her grip was surprising strong and callused.

"Nice to meet you, Dean." Faith grinned at him, brown eyes bright and friendly. She gestured to the bartender. "Shot of whiskey, please." A glance towards him. "Can I get you anything?"

He raised his half-full bottle. "Good for now, thanks. Might take you up on that later."

"Looking forward to it. Cheers." Faith picked up the shot glass seconds after the bartender placed it in front of her. She threw her head back and downed the whiskey in one go, then gestured for another. "So tell me. What brings you to the City of Angels?"

* * *

**August 2003, Cleveland, Ohio**

Dean kept his eyes on the toilet, grateful that the tan shower curtain only hinted at the woman's silhouette. This wasn't really a good moment for distractions.

"What's up?" Still cheerful, still flirtatious. He wondered if that was all about to change.

"So. Vampire Slayer, huh?"

* * *

**August 2003, Cleveland, Ohio**

Words weren't really working for Dean, so he took a moment to stare at the woman, who had somehow managed to stake six vampires without messing up her spangly halter top or her makeup. "The title's kinda accurate, isn't it?"

"What title?" Having decided that Dean didn't show signs of impending death, Faith started walking back the way they had come, toward the mouth of the alleyway.

He hurried to catch up with her. "Vampire Slayer. That was . . . I've never seen anything like that before." There. That sounded better than '_You're an effing killing machine, but I still think you're hot as hell._'

* * *

**September 20th, 2003, ShopRite, Cleveland, Ohio**

"Slayers don't usually mess with ghosts. The closest I've ever come was this thing that could impersonate any dead person in the world, but it wasn't really a ghost. More like a prehistoric evil entity? Anyway, we ended up destroying the entire town to stop it."

"Why are you whispering?" came the confused response.

"I'm in the grocery store, and I don't want to get kicked out before I hit the frozen section."

After fifteen seconds' silence, "You call me while your _grocery shopping_?"

"What? Half of the people who are here by themselves are on their phones. Question – which one's better: two percent or one percent milk fat?"

"Two percent," Dean replied shortly.

"That's what I was thinking."

* * *

**January 23rd 2004, York, Pennsylvania 3:00 a.m.**

The Slayer pulled a few very colorful and anatomically impossible commands from her vast collection of profanity and hurled them vehemently at the hunter. "You don't get to do this, Dean. You don't get to pretend to be my friend and then frakking touch me when I tell you not to. That's not okay. You _ever _do that again, and I will _personally_ put you in the ground. Six foot deep. You piss me off enough, and I'll put you down there alive."

He opened his mouth to say something, but Faith cut him off with a savage gesture.

"Not finished yet. I'm not your little brother. I'm not some weepy two-bit whore you can bat your pretty green eyes at. I am Faith the Vampire Slayer. And I don't need your effing help to deal with anything. Not nightmares, not vampire bites, not _anything_."

With a short pause for breath, Faith finished in a voice of deadly calm. "You'd best remember, Dean Winchester. All those monsters of yours? All those things that go bump in the night? They're scared of _me_."

Dean sat on the far edge of the bed, watching her warily. He reached one hand beneath his pillow, fingers outstretched wide. They closed around the grip of his Colt. Just in case.

* * *

**February 14th, 2004, Cleveland, Ohio, 6:30 p.m.**

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Faith exhaled, huffing loudly. "Because I didn't want this to happen."

The hunter waved that half-assed explanation aside with his handgun. "Were you ever going to tell me?"

"When I was ready."

He was trying not to get angry, but this sidestepping of hers was not helping. "And when was that going to be?"

"When I knew you better. When I figured out how to say it without running you off. 'Hi, my name's Faith, and I used to kill people.' Doesn't exactly inspire confidence."

* * *

**October 6th, 2005, Camp Premiere New Orleans, Louisiana, 1:47 a.m.**

Finally, when they were as safe as they could be while on a job, he grabbed her shoulders and pushed her against the center pole of the tent and held her there. Not hard enough to hurt, but forceful enough to show her that he meant business.

"What the hell was that?" he demanded. "What if that guy hadn't been a vampire? What if his friends had been quicker on the draw? Or if I'd been slower getting over that fence? You'd be dead. We'd _both_ be dead. What the frak were you thinking?"

The Slayer didn't move to push him away. She grinned wolfishly, and Dean realized with a wave of revulsion that she was still on her post-Slaying high.

"I know vampires," she answered simply, tilting her head back to look up at him. "Knew it was a bunch of fangs as soon as they appeared. Just wanted a few minutes to confirm. Waited for you to get out of the way so you wouldn't get hurt."

Dean fought the urge to shake her until her teeth rattled in her thick, stupid, reckless skull. "We're partners, Faith," he ground out, his own teeth gritted around the frustration. "You don't get to make those kinds of calls."

"I'm the _Slayer_." This time, there was added heat in her tone.

"You've got a death wish."

She had the gall to laugh at him. "And you don't? Don't lie, Dean. It doesn't look good on you."

The hunter's fingers closed a little tighter on her collarbones. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"Always throwing yourself in front of someone else? Willing to go the extra mile to save a civilian? Particularly when it involves a lethal situation? Sound familiar? . . . let me go," she added.

Retracting his hands, he moved away. Faith patted him absently on the chest, brushing against him as she walked around to the far side of her cot.

She paused, one hand resting on the top of her backpack. "Don't worry, handsome. I'll keep this our little secret." The Slayer's sardonic smile flickered briefly. "One way or another, it all ends in blood. Nothing wrong with trying to make it a little heroic, too."

* * *

**May 20th, 2006, Cleveland, Ohio, 6:30 p.m.**

"There's something I need to tell you," the man said hesitantly, his thumb resting on the machete's edge.

Faith glanced up from oiling her crossbow and raised an eyebrow. "Yeah? This about you seeing that girl? Carrie, Clary – the one that you told about hunting?"

"Cassie, but how'd you know?"

"Sam's been dropping anvils all evening."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"I slept with her." The words came out in a rush, like an

anxious thoroughbred sprinting out of the gate.

"Are we talkin' angry makeup sex or the 'you're my one true love' kind?"

"Uh . . ." The hunter found himself tripping over his tongue. "That wasn't the reaction I was expecting."

It was surprisingly easy to figure out what was on his mind. "Your brother's been dropping relationship anvils, too, huh?"

"How'd you – "

Finished, Faith set the crossbow aside. "Dean, who you sleep with isn't any of my business. What's got you so worked up, and not in the fun way?"

"Do you . . . do you think we're dating?" he asked hesitantly.

"Whoah there." The Slayer held up a hand to stop him. "What, cause we've had bad sex a couple of times?"

"Hey." Dean elbowed her. "It was damn good sex, and you know it."

Faith laughed. "Okay, okay. Yeah, it was. Is. Will be? I don't like to limit the future."

* * *

**August 30, 2006, Princeton, New Jersey, 5:15 p.m.**

"What's with being all angry and overprotective lately?" The Slayer did not wait for his response, reaching into her duffel and finding the single pair of sweat pants that she had luckily packed. She gingerly slid the sweat pants up and over her new bandages. Only then did she glance in his direction. "What?" she added, exhausted.

With a nonchalant shrug, Dean crumpled the empty gauze packaging and dumped it into the trash. He tugged the bathroom door halfway open and stopped. "I'm tired of losing people," was all he said, and then he was gone.

* * *

**June 18th, 2007, Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, Santa Barbara, California 6:30 p.m.**

Sobering, Dean said gently, "I'm sorry about Giles."

Faith closed her eyes. "Me, too."

His hold around her tightened, and the Slayer turned her head into his shoulder. She lingered there for a long moment, allowing the warm solidity that was Dean to drive out everything else.

At length, she lifted her head and broke the silence. "Thanks for making the trip. Sorry you missed the action." The darkness made it easier for both of them to be honest.

"Hey. I didn't care about the big demon battle. That's not why I'm here."

The Slayer let this wash over her, taking in what he had said and what he had not said. "I'm not good with words, you know."

"Huh. Coulda fooled me. You talk enough."

"Dean." Faith pushed herself up on one elbow and kissed him to shut him up.

"You get all that?" she asked a while later, slightly breathless.

"Maybe." His smile was audible. "But I'm pretty slow. Tell me again?"

* * *

**July 3rd, 2007, Lake View Cemetery, Cleveland, Ohio 11:00 p.m.**

The hunter got to his feet. "So that's it – no justice? No punishment for what's he's done?"

"If Buffy wanted Angel punished, she should have done something herself. Not sent him to me." Faith accepted a hand and let Dean pull her upright. She steadied herself on her crutches, ignoring the protests of her aching armpits. Only a few more weeks, and she'd be off these forever.

"Think about it like this," she said as they made their slow way through the tangled insides of the bug-powered ship back towards the galley. "If Sam did something awful, something really, really, _really_ bad, would you be able to punish him? Would you be able to hurt your brother if he went a little Dark Side?"

Dean frowned. He didn't like wandering down this particular mental path. It made him too uncomfortable. But he reckoned Slayer girl was actively trying here, and he supposed the least thing he could do was try, too. "Last fall, we dealt with this demonic virus thing out in Oregon. Sam got bitten, and it was only a matter of time until the infection spread, made him dangerous."

"What'd you do?"

"I sent everyone away, waited with Sam for things to get bad. I was gonna end it all. Shoot him, then shoot myself."

"Dean –" The sympathy in her voice made him recoil. He didn't need her damn sympathy, especially not when he was still peeved with her over her irrational attachment to that bloodsucker in the brig.

Only a tinge of that irritation made its way into his voice. "I was tired, Faith. Tired of . . . of everything. Of trying to live up to what my Dad wanted. Tired of knowing that I'd made a promise to waste my little brother – the kid whose diapers I changed. Up until Sam took off for California, he was my number one concern, you know? Feed Sammy. Take care of Sammy. Protect Sammy. Killing him . . . if I ever had to do that, it would be the end of me."

Faith stopped their progress further down the hatchway with an outstretched crutch. He recognized the signal and halted. Leaning up against a bulkhead, the Slayer watched him carefully. Dean moved to stand beside her, mostly so he didn't have to look into those brown eyes brimming with concern. Their shoulders brushed, and that was enough to loosen his tongue one final, fatal degree.

"Maybe that's why I was willing to deal with a demon," he said quietly, the words carrying a faint echo in the deserted hatchway. "It's not - I can't - I can't fail that charge. Taking care of Sam, it's still my job. It'll always be my job. And I can't fail him. I can't. So when I did, I had to do everything I could to make it right."

Dean shut his eyes tight as emotion rushed him. He tried to push it all away – the incomparable pain that resurged every time he thought about Sam's too-quiet body lying limp, lifeless, dead in that shack, the fear that he felt whenever the subject of his deal came up. He'd been doing a good job, the last few weeks, pretending that he wasn't a dead man walking. But now the truth of his situation came rushing back in, and panic threatened to undo him.

"I don't want to go to Hell, Faith."

Her hand found his, and their fingers interlocked around the cool aluminum of her crutch. "I know."

* * *

**May 1st, 2008, London, England, 6:00 a.m.**

Faith had been waiting for this particular call. She had wondered, expected, by alternating moments hoped and dreaded that it was coming, and so she had started sleeping with a phone by her pillow, its volume turned all the way up. Never let it be said that Faith Lehane didn't know how to prepare.

"Give me just a minute, okay?" she said and then pulled the phone away from her ear.

She stumbled out of bed, creeping on tiptoe past the half-open door to Giles' study. The faint glow of a table lamp spread out in a triangle over the hall carpet. Angel must still be awake, brooding over some occult mystery in a musty leather-bound volume. He tended to do that, nowadays. As it was technically her apartment these days, there was no real need for Faith to creep. Still, she would rather avoid explanations at the moment.

Rounding the corner of the hall, she settled onto the large leather couch that dominated the living room. Her back pressed against one of the arms, she tucked her feet beneath the cushions at the far end. The Slayer braced herself and brought the phone back up.

"Hey," she said breathlessly. "I wondered if you were gonna call."

"I'm that predictable?" His voice was quiet, barely above a whisper.

"I've been watching the calendar."

* * *

**September 20th, 2008, Peoria, Illinois, 5:30 p.m.**

He snuck out of the motel room while Sam was taking a shower. Bobby was still at the hospital with Pamela, and Dean had planned to use the down time to get some shut-eye. But before any more time passed, he had other things to settle. On his way out, he grabbed Sam's cell phone from off the bathroom counter. The hunter sat behind the wheel of his baby, one boot dangling out the open door to rest on the concrete, and made a final call.

Someone picked up on the third ring. "What do you want, Sam?"

Now that he heard her voice, Dean's mind went blank.

The woman continued, brusque and impatient. "No word from you for what – three months – and now you call me? You gotta want something. Spit it out before I hang up. I've got a Slayer schism to fix and a skin-stealing demon to track down, so dealing with your crap is nowhere near the top of my to-do list."

"Not Sam."

"Excuse me?"

"It's me, Dean."

This statement was met with a sharp intake of breath.

Dean pressed on, unwilling to wait for the inevitable rejection. "Want me to prove it? Fine, I'll prove it. You have an unhealthy obsession with popcorn, and you eat the stuff at least twice a week. If you could tap one celebrity, it would be Daniel Craig. I have _no_ idea why."

"Dean?" It was a cross between a croak and a plea. There came a soft thunk as the Slayer collapsed onto something. Probably a bed, from the creaking noise of the springs.

"It's me."

"You're . . . you're . . ."

"I'm alive. All in one piece, fresher than a daisy. . . I don't get it, either. No chance you're the one who busted me out?" he asked reflexively. The hunter was pretty sure, both from her emails and from the reaction against Pamela, that Faith had nothing to do with it. Burning people's eyes out wasn't really her thing.

"No . . . no . . . I tried," she said in a rush, her voice shaky and desperate. "I tried, Dean, I tried. I – "

"I know," he said softly. "I checked my email."

* * *

**November 3rd, 2008, St. Augustine, Florida, 3:30 a.m.**

"I showed you mine, so it's time for you to pay up and show me yours. What's got you up this early?"

Dean exhaled sharply. "Hell."

Neither truly shocked nor surprised, Faith leaned against him. "Oh. I thought you didn't remember anything?"

"That was then. This is now. I see it all the time," the hunter confessed, his lips inches away from the rim of the whiskey bottle. "See it, hear it, smell it. Dream about it almost every night. And sometimes," he swallowed, "sometimes the angels like to get all talky with me in my dreams. I know that they know – they're the ones who pulled me out, as Cass likes to remind me every frigging time he wants something from me. But there's something different about them watching it happen inside my head, you know?"

"Gimme that." She tugged the whiskey out of his fingers and tilted her head backwards. "My turn." Faith chugged and chugged until her mouth, throat, and stomach were all one contiguous burning line. Then she passed the bottle back to Dean, swiping across her lips with the back of one hand.

"What're you doing that for?"

"Because right now, it sounds like everything sucks. And if you're gonna get drunk, I'm getting drunk, too."

He sloshed the amber liquid around in its bottle. "Sounds good to me."

"Yeah . . . hey, Dean?"

"Uh huh?"

The Slayer reached for the alcohol and downed half of what was left to steel her nerves. "This is maybe gonna sound a little out of left field, but you ever think about maybe wanting something more?"

"Something more than what, cheap whiskey?" Dean pulled the bottle away from her. "Easy there, champ. You keep going at it like that, and pretty soon it'll all be coming back up. Don't they teach you how to share in Slayer preschool?"

"I've been dry for almost six months. And I just took a Wonderland fall down memory lane. I deserve a drink."

He relinquished the whiskey. "Suit yourself. 'S long as you answer the question this time – something more than what?"

One hand closing around the cool glass, the Slayer gestured at the empty space between them with her other hand. "Than this. You an' me."

Dean squashed the impulse to take the alcohol away from her again. "What are you talking about?"

Faith swished a mouthful around her teeth and then swallowed. "I'm back there in Sunnydale, in a setup that's better than anything I've ever had, with a stable relationship and Buffy on my side, and all the worst things I've done never happened – no murder, no betrayal, no torture, no jail – and I should've been happy. I should've been goddamned thrilled. Instead, all I could think about was how I needed to talk to you. Like, I'm in a world that's the closest thing to perfect that I was ever gonna see, and it wasn't enough. Without you, it wasn't enough."

She finished off the whiskey and set the bottle down in the sink next to her. "And it got me thinking, both back there and then here, about this, about us. We never talk about it. We talk about everything else under the sun, but never that."

"Faith . . ." It was almost a plea. "Why're you bringing this up now?"

"Because the last eighteen months have been awful, and the world sucks a whole lot less when you're around. Because I'm tired of missing you and wondering what it's supposed to mean. Come on, Dean. You telling me that you don't feel it, too? That there isn't something here?"

The hunter pushed himself off the counter and backed a couple steps away. He just needed to create a little space right now. After taking a deep breath, he said, "You really wanna do this? Aren't you still coming down off the . . . the . . ." He made a swirling gesture with both hands to represent the djinn's crazy town.

"Dean, we don't do this now, we never will."

He padded back and forth across the kitchen linoleum in his socks. "Really not the best time."

"I know. Never is."

"You want the truth?"

For the first time since broaching the subject, she broke eye contact. "That would be nice."

"Truth is . . . " said Dean, tossing common sense and caution to the wind. "The truth is I'm frigging terrified out of my frigging mind. This angel stuff . . . I don't know what it means, and I don't know if I can trust any of 'em. They're all on the war path about Sam – and, yeah, he's headed pretty far off the reservation – but I'm not sure how much of that is because he's working with Ruby and how much of that is because they're threatening him to manipulate me.

"And, you're . . . God, Faith, there's no one I'd rather have at my back, except for maybe Sam, sometimes, and you're sexy as hell. And, yeah, you're pretty much my only friend that isn't Sam or Bobby, and maybe sometimes . . . Maybe sometimes I wonder what exactly it is that we're doing, but I can't right now. With these angels hanging around everywhere, I can't have any more . . ."

"Any more complications?"

The hunter exhaled shortly. "Yeah."

* * *

**December 26th, 2008, Cheyenne, Wyoming, 12:30 p.m.**

Faith paused, choosing her words carefully. She swallowed once and then asked, "So, what's all this about the Apocalypse?"

Without turning to look at her, Dean addressed the wall. "Cass and Alastair . . . they both said the same thing. When a righteous man sheds blood in Hell, that breaks the first seal. I started this. I started all of this. It's all my damn fault. And according to Cass, I'm the only one who can finish it. But I can't, Faith, I can't. I'm not strong enough. I'm not big enough. It's . . . it's too damn much." His voice cracked and broke, and he gazed even more steadfastly at the bad hospital paint job.

"Hey." The bed dipped beside him, and suddenly there was an arm around his shoulders, and a hand firmly turned his chin around to face her. "Hey, Dean. Look at me. Please."

Dean gazed up at the Slayer, his lips pursed against the sheer misery welling inside of him, blinking heavily to keep from breaking any further. "What?" he asked desperately, his voice nearly strangled. "What can you do to make this better?"

"I'm still not sold on this Apocalypse," said Faith in a quiet tone as her brown eyes bored into his green ones. They were unusually warm, and Dean's voice wasn't the only one cracking. "And if you wanna hit the road and tell all these angels to go screw themselves, I'll be right beside you. Either way, whatever you do, I'll be right beside you. 'Cause I know you, Dean Winchester. And you're plenty strong. You're the strongest man I've ever met. Hell, you're the best man I've ever met."

The Slayer leaned down. For a brief moment, her lips covered his and moved against them, soft and gentle and slow. Then she sat back up against the hospital pillows and drew him further into her embrace, until his cheek rested against her shoulder, just brushing her collarbone.

He shut his eyes and listened to the faint lub-dub of her heartbeat as the arm around his shoulders tightened and her other hand came up to rub his arm through the sleeve of his hospital gown.

"I heard what you said to Cass, about his dad and yours." Her chin bumped the top of his head as she spoke. "Like I've said before, I don't know much about God. And I didn't really know your dad. But I know they both woulda been fools not to be damn proud to have a son like you."

* * *

**May 12th, 2009, Cold Spring, Minnesota, 10:14 p.m**

The hunter lay in the wreckage of the honeymoon suite, gasping for air. Tears trickled out of the corner of his eyes and leaked into his ears. Snot dripped from his nose, but he was too exhausted to wipe it away. Everything ached and burned, and there was a gaping hole in his gut that Dean didn't think would ever, ever heal.

He dug his phone out of his pocket with shaking fingers and drew gusts of air in through protesting lungs as the call rang out.

_Please pick up,_ he thought with that small part of his mind that wasn't howling in wordless misery. _Come on. Please._

She did. "Dean?" Partially drowned out by the noise of a cheering crowd, her voice was sharp, attentive, concerned.

"You okay?"

"No."

"Do I . . . Want me to . . . Should I come get you?"

"No. I just need a minute." He forced himself to breathe. "Sam's - Sam's gone."

* * *

**June 17th, 2009, Picadilly Circus, London, England, 2:15 p.m.**

The Slayer set her cell phone on the nightstand and crawled beneath the navy duvet.

"Hit the light?" she said from behind her closed eyelids.

The light switch made a quiet click as it was flicked off, and then the mattress dipped on the other side. Dean removed his shoes in silence and then stretched out on top of the covers. "Interesting morning," he observed, plumping the pillow into a satisfactory shape.

"You're gonna get cold when the central air kicks on," was the only reply.

"Might be worth it to clear up some things," replied Dean.

Opening her eyes, the Slayer pushed herself halfway up on her elbows. She rolled onto her right side and stared at him suspiciously. "Like what?" Her tone could have corroded stainless steel.

Unabashed, Dean met her gaze. "Some things about you and me, for starters." When he got nothing in response, only an intensification of the brown-eyed glare currently boring holes in his face, the hunter added, "We got a job to do."

"What the hell, Winchester? How does this –" Faith indicated the foot and a half of empty queen-sized bed in between the two of them – "keep us from doing our job? It's a nap, not an orgy. It's not even like half of an orgy. We both get under the covers, I stay on my side, you stay on yours. Everybody sleeps, nobody freezes, and nobody has any extracurricular fun. We've done this like a thousand times."

"I didn't say it was us that needed things cleared up," clarified the hunter.

"Unbelievable," Faith groaned, flipping over onto her stomach. She buried her face in her pillow. "Un-freaking-believable." The Slayer lifted her head long enough to ask, "This is about Buffy, isn't it? Isn't it?"

"We got a job to do," Dean repeated. "And I don't want her to give you a hard time."

"News flash, Dean. B doesn't need an excuse to give me a hard time. I breathe wrong, and that's reason enough."

"Which is why I don't want to give her anything extra to go on."

Faith looked up one last time and glared at him. "When we finish this thing, you and I are having a little talk about unsolicited chivalry. I do _not_ need you to protect me from Buffy. I can handle her."

"I know you can," he said. "But that doesn't mean I'm not going to have your back."

* * *

**November 30th, 2009, Picadilly Circus, London, England**

To: 2135556081  
From: 7855552575  
Time: 7:12 p.m.  
Message:

I'm sorry.

. . . .

To:7855552575  
From: 2135556081  
Time: 7:45 p.m.  
Message:

Go on . . .

. . . .

To: 2135556081  
From: 7855552575  
Time: 8:01 p.m.  
Message:

I don't want anyone else to die for the choices Sam and I made. This is our fault – we broke the seals, we brought this on, and we need to handle it.

. . . .

To:7855552575  
From: 2135556081  
Time: 8:04 p.m.  
Message:

Thing like the Apocalypse, if it hadn't've been you who opened Pandora's Box, it woulda been someone else. Big Daddy Evil's never been good at staying quiet in its cage.

. . . .

To: 2135556081  
From: 7855552575  
Time: 8:07 p.m.  
Message:

I know. Doesn't change the fact that Ellen and Jo died for a mistake we made. You shouldn't have to.

. . . .

To:7855552575  
From: 2135556081  
Time: 8:10 p.m.  
Message:

Dude. You and me, the road we travel, it's always going to end bloody. Doesn't mean there isn't value in it. Okay?

. . . .

To: 2135556081  
From: 7855552575  
Time: 8:12 p.m.  
Message:

Here's the deal. If Sam and me can't pull this off, we're gonna need someone who can take over when we fail.

. . .

To:7855552575  
From: 2135556081  
Time: 8:17 p.m.  
Message:

So I can help take down Michael and Lucifer, but only after they hollow you two out from the inside first and leave everything that was you and Sam in a giant pile of mental goop? What makes you think I'd have a snowball's chance in Hell of succeeding?

. . . .

To: 2135556081  
From: 7855552575  
Time: 8:20 p.m.  
Message:

You always manage to save Angel. No matter what the odds, no matter how many people disagree, you always manage to bring that sonnuvabitch back to himself. I got a feeling, if Michael gets himself all up in me, you might be the only one who'd never give up.

. . . .

* * *

**April 8th, 2010, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 8:05 a.m., CST**

His salvation swept into the diner just as he swallowed the last bite of pancake. The bell by the front door tinkled when she walked in, and Dean dropped a crumpled ten-dollar bill onto the table and got to his feet. He met her near the door, and they walked back out into the rain together. Even at eight in the morning, she was ready for battle in black leather and scarlet lipstick, and he had caught a glimpse of the angel sword strapped to her waist as she pushed the glass door open for him.

"Where'd you park the car?" he asked softly. They headed up the street towards the more populated part of town.

"Few blocks away," she replied. "You have any problems slipping animal control?"

"Nothing I couldn't handle. Thanks for getting here."

Faith shrugged casually, her shoulder bumping against him. "Anytime. You're getting to be quite the damsel in distress, you realize that?"

The hunter reached for her hand, sliding his fingers between hers. Deep down, he couldn't silence the voices that were craving human contact, screaming at him that this might be his last time to touch someone – anyone – before Michael took control. To his relief, the Slayer did not push him away.

"That make you my knight in shining armor?" he teased while they waited for the stoplight to change colors.

She snorted. "Just don't ask me to ride any horses."

"I think I can manage that."

* * *

**May 9th, 2010, Columbia, Missouri, 11:00 p.m.**

When at last she emerged and dried off, it was time for the laundry to have finished. The Slayer folded the freshly cleaned clothing on top of the hot dryer. Exhausted, she carried them back to her hotel room and tucked them inside Dean's duffel. He was still staring at the blank television screen.

Faith glanced at the clock on the nightstand. 10:07 pm. She exhaled slowly and walked to the door to find the light switch. "Dean. Lights out." The Slayer flicked the toggle, extinguishing the overhead lights, and made her way back to the bed.

As she leaned over the nightstand lamp in search of the elusive knob, a hand grabbed her wrist, enclosing the thin bones in strong fingers.

"Stay," croaked a voice harsh and dry from disuse.

"I'm not going anywhere." Faith's fingers closed on the cord at last, and she plunged the room into darkness. She attempted to step away to her own bed, but the hand on her wrist drew her up short.

"Stay," Dean repeated. He scooted over to indicate the mattress next to him.

For a moment, Faith perched awkwardly on the edge of the bed, a half-dozen complicated emotions bubbling their way to the surface. Then, finally, she lay down and tugged the comforter up over them both. Thin and scratchy, the sheets were warm from his body. The Slayer rolled over onto her left side, turning her back on Dean as he released her wrist. She told herself it was to give him privacy, but in reality, if Faith had to look into those empty green eyes for a moment longer, she was likely to punch him in the face.

Dean moved closer to her, and his right arm wrapped itself around her stomach, the heavy weight of it draping over her hip. He clung to her, pulling her tight against him. Faith could feel the solid warmth of his chest against her back and one of his knees poking into her calves.

Despite her frustration, Faith found herself relaxing a fraction. She leaned back into the embrace and brought her left arm up to touch his right, running her fingertips through the short hair covering his forearm. Dean tightened his hold in response. His nose brushed the back of her neck, and each of his exhales ghosted through her wet hair.

"I'm sorry about Sam." She had been thinking the words all afternoon, but only now did Faith find the courage to say them.

His thumb stroked gently across her stomach, a patternless caress over the fabric of her tank top. "Stay," Dean said a third and final time.

Faith shut her eyes and fought the urge to cry. "Okay, Dean." Her voice was huskier than she would have preferred. "I'll stay. As long as you need me to, I'll stay."

* * *

**September 3rd, 2010, Cicero, Indiana, 9:30 p.m.**

"God frakking dammit," growled Faith into her ear. "Fine. Just put me on speaker, then." Under her breath, she added, "Frakking dammit all to frakking hell. Last frakking thing I frakking need tonight."

Raising her eyebrows, Lisa pressed the speaker button and held the phone to the crack beneath the door. "You're on speaker," she informed the Slayer.

For a half-second, Faith said nothing. Then she bellowed, "_DEAN_!" The word was guttural and harsh, and it came out ten decibels louder than Lisa had expected. Even through the speakerphone, it was laden with a panicked desperation that almost convinced Lisa there was a true emergency. Inside the bathroom, the shower shut off abruptly.

Hardly stopping for breath, fury drowning out panic, the Slayer continued, "Goddamn you, Dean Winchester. You open that goddamned door right this goddamned second. You hear me? You frakking open the frakking door."

The lock clicked, and the silver handle depressed as the door was pulled open from the inside. Straightening, Lisa looked upwards into Dean's haggard face. A towel hastily looped around his waist, he was dripping water onto the bathroom linoleum. For a mad, fleeting second, she wondered if he had been trying to drown himself.

Dean lowered his eyes from her worried expression to the cell phone in her hand. "Faith?" he asked warily without reaching for the black plastic. "What happened to the slime demons?"

She did not answer the question. Rather, Faith barked out one of her own, "You alive?"

Tightening the towel that was slipping down his hips, the man said only, "Yes."

The next question came out even more brusque than the first had been. "You trying to off yourself?"

"No." With a frown, Dean glanced back at Lisa.

"World ending for any reason?"

"No."

"Am I still on speaker?"

"Yes."

"Good." Something inhuman snarled on Faith's end of the line. Then came a heavy thud and the whooshing of a fall breeze. "God frakking dammit," muttered the Slayer. "You'd think the frakking idiots would've learned by now that trying to get the frakking jump on me _NEVER WORKS!_" The last two words were shouted.

"Faith?" prompted Lisa. "Everything okay?"

The Slayer ignored her. "You can both hear me, then? Okay. Here's the deal. For the frakking love of God, frakking talk to each other. Dean, you need some alone time, you frakking tell her. Lisa, you get concerned about him, you frakking ask him. Dean, when she asks, you frakking answer."

Faith did not pause for breath, merely steam-rollered on, "I've got a frakking pack of slime demons to take out tonight, and I'm only halfway through, plus the three vamps who're scheduled to rise before sun-up. I do not have frakking time for this. So for God's sake, _stop_. Stop dragging me into the middle of this. You two work out your frakking relationship on your own. Frakking leave me the frakking hell out of it. 'Cuz I've got better frakking things to frakking do."

* * *

**October 31, 2010, Cicero, Indiana, 5:30 p.m.**

"Well . . ." Dean had no idea where to start. "You want to talk?"

"No."

The hunter settled himself a little more comfortably on the concrete stoop. "Almost two months since I heard from you. You sure you got nothing for me? No vamps making horrendously stupid decisions or stupider jokes? No rant about the Watchers Council? No new project of Angel's?"

Her glare cut him short. "Dean."

"Yeah?"

"I don't want to talk. I just want to sit and drink until I can't remember my own name."

"Picked the wrong place, then. You know I'm not gonna let you give yourself a hangover."

The Slayer glanced back at her boots. "Because I wanted to drink with you," she admitted quietly.

"Too bad. Not gonna happen." At her wounded look, he added, "But I will force-feed you chili, and then you can help me and Lisa pass out candy" Dean nudged her shoulder with his. "You can even camp out on the couch tonight if you want. And when you're ready, we'll talk."

Faith leaned away, her shoulders hunching nearly up to her ears. "I'm fine."

"Hey. Look at me." Unthinking, the hunter reached, catching her chin between his thumb and forefinger and dragging it upwards until she was looking him straight in the face. "Don't lie to me, Faith," he warned as he released her. "You're not fine. And you're going to tell me about it. When you're ready."

"You know, this whole not talking to you thing kinda sucks," Faith mumbled.

"I know," replied Dean as he snagged her bottle of vodka off the porch. He extended his free hand to pull her up to her feet. "Come on. Let's go."

* * *

**February 17, 2011, Cicero, Indiana**

Shortly after Valentine's Day, the hunter found himself once again hiding out in the bathroom, making clandestine phone calls. He had used the four-letter 'L' word, he explained. Lisa had said, "I love you," and he had repeated the phrase back without even really thinking about it.

"When was the last time you said 'I love you' to someone?" he demanded from Faith in a moment of hysterical panic.

"My mom. I was thirteen. Not since then. Why?"

"Exactly," Dean half-yelped, half-whispered into the phone line. "I shouldn't have said it. It's dangerous. It jinxes things."

At which point, the Slayer simply gave a long-suffering sigh. "Dean?"

"Yeah?"

"Hate to break it to you, princess, but the only thing that's gonna jinx your relationship with Lisa is you being a giant bonehead."

* * *

**October 17th, 2011, Battle Creek, Michigan, 9:10 p.m.**

The Slayer was waiting for him outside, leaning up against the driver side door of his Impala. A stake was gripped loosely in her hand, and a sheathed machete hung from her hip. Her heart beat slow and regular, although she looked up from the ground at his approach with a narrowed, unfriendly gaze.

"I told you not to go in without me," she said coolly, tossing the stake from one hand to the other. "You had another thirty seconds before I came in to kick your ass. You bite anyone?"

"No."

"Show me your teeth."

Dean bared his bloodless fangs, allowing the siren call of her blood to lure out the vampire within.

"Mmm." After watching him relentlessly for a moment, the Slayer held out her hand. "Give me the keys, cowboy. I'm driving."

* * *

**December 18th, 2011, Bloch Oxbow State Park, Wisconsin, 7:30 p.m.**

Dean followed at her heels all the way back to the fire site, racking his brains for something to say. He didn't know what he thought, didn't know what he wanted, except that right now he wanted _her_. And back there in that clearing, the only thing he had been thinking about was her. Lisa had been nowhere on his radar - not until the Slayer brought her up.

"Faith," he finally said when they stepped through the ring of trees at the edge of the cleared acre around the logging office.

She did not bother to turn around. "What?"

The hunter half-jogged a few steps in order to overtake her. He gripped her by the shoulders. "Hey. Look at me."

Unimpressed, Faith raised her eyebrows. "I'm looking," she said with a blend of exasperation and affection.

Dean moved forwards, pushing her against the tree they had just stepped around. As her back collided with the tree bark, the Slayer gave him a look. Even in the darkness, he could read her silent expression. _This had better be good, Winchester._

He started speaking, the words coming out in a rush as he gazed at a point on the tree trunk directly over her right shoulder. "The world keeps turning upside down on me," he said in a quiet voice, barely louder than the wind. "Lisa and me - that's Gone Baby Gone. Doesn't matter how I feel about it. My brother's the Terminator. Half the time I think he'd kill me, just to see what I'd look like when I died. And hell, I'm working for frigging Crowley!"

Faith said nothing, merely shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She did not touch him, and she did not push him away. She simply waited for him to continue.

The hunter forged ahead, "The last few years - hell, since my dad died, it seems like nothing makes sense. The moment I get to my feet, the moment I think I understand crap, the world starts jerking again."

His eyes slowly drifted from the tree to her face. "And the one thing that doesn't change, the one person I can count on, that's you. You an' me."

Dean leaned in closer. His hands slid from her shoulders to her waist, and his voice dropped still lower, treading that fine line between sincerity and purposeful melodrama. "When it's you and me, the world stops moving," he admitted. "It gets quiet. I want you, Faith. I _need_ you." The hunter paused with his mouth a hair's breadth away from her ear. "That answer your question?" he asked almost playfully.

She hesitated and then reached forward, snagging his belt loops with her gloved fingers. "It'll do."

* * *

**July 2nd, 2012, Whitefish, Montana, 7:30 p.m.**

He woke to the smell of buttery popcorn and the faint echo of gunfire. Between heartbeats, he recognized the gunfire as coming from an old Western, and then he let it go. His head was resting on something warm and hard – a leg – and a nailed hand was gently ruffling through his hair and scratching his scalp. Above his head, someone was eating rather loudly. _Crunch. Crunch._

Dean did not bother opening his eyes. "Faith?"

_Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. "_Shhh," came the familiar admonition. _Crunch_. "Go to sleep."

As he turned his head down further towards the couch cushions, the hunter's nose pressed against her leg. He inhaled dust and motor oil and the faintest hint of the Slayer's detergent. "If you get popcorn grease on me . . ."

"So help me God?" joked Faith, and she ran a light hand from his forehead to the nape of his neck and back again. "Don't worry. It's separation of church and state up here. Popcorn hand doesn't touch you." _Crunch. Crunch. _The Slayer reached for Dean's blanket and tugged it back up to his chin. "Relax."

Behind his closed eyes, Dean did just that. He fell back into his opiate-induced haze and allowed the soothing touch to relax him until finally he drifted away into sleep.

* * *

**July 3rd, 2012, Whitefish, Montana, 8:30 a.m.**

"So. You wanna tell me why Bobby called you out here to be my babysitter? Or should I just go ahead and start guessing?"

The Slayer lowered herself onto the planter next to him, but she said nothing, merely gazed at the trees to avoid his dead-eyed stare.

"Okay." He could read her silence. "Guessing it is. He played you that voicemail, didn't he?" the hunter demanded. "That goddamned stupid voicemail? And you threw yourself up onto your white horse and came dashing to my rescue. That about cover it?"

"He did show me the voicemail," she admitted.

Resisting the urge to throw his hands into the air, Dean snorted. "I knew it. Look, I'm fine, okay, Faith? I'm fine. Other than this damn shattered tibia, I'm just fine."

* * *

**March 19th, 2013, Charleston, South Carolina, 7:48 p.m.**

The man who answered the door stared at her first in shock and then in irritation. Without speaking, he stepped back from the doorway and gestured for her to come in. When the door closed behind her, he grumbled, "Sam called you in to babysit me, huh?"

Fine. Antagonistic it was. Faith could run with that. "What?" She feigned surprise. "No 'Hi, Faith, how are you? Your makeup looks really great today. Is that a new jacket?'"

Dean crossed his arms across his chest. "Hi, Faith. How are you?" he asked with syrupy sarcasm, which then drained away to exhaustion. "Your makeup's good, but it's always good. You've had that jacket for four years. There anything else you wanted? You just missed Sam – too bad. Seems like you two've been talking a lot lately."

Refusing to be baited, she lied smoothly, "I'm not here to babysit you. I got a nasty vamp case on the outskirts of town. Word had it you were in the area. There's a spare helmet on my bike. You wanna come?"

His posture relaxing a fraction, the hunter clarified, "We talking one vamp or a nest?"

"Nest the size of Texas." It was a slight exaggeration, but by the time he realized that, he would have burned off enough of his aggression on some unlucky fang.

"What're you waiting for?" Dean pushed past Faith to reach the outdoors. "Let's go."

* * *

**April 20th, 2013, San Antonio, Texas, 9:45 p.m.**

"_Go_," the hunter repeated more forcefully. "If she needs you, go. Sam and I can handle whatever Leviathan crap comes up in the meantime. Go take care of your girl."

Faith flashed him a look of gratitude as she hastily began bundling her shower things back into their plastic bag.

"Thanks," she said hurriedly, heading towards the main room.

"Hang on." Dean inserted himself between the Slayer and the doorway and caught her wrist as she passed him. He tilted his chin down and kissed her harshly before stepping back.

The Slayer looked up at him, her dark eyes wide with surprise. _"The hell . . .?"_

He smirked. "I told you we weren't done, Payback's a bitch, isn't it?"

* * *

**August 27th, 2014, Bar Harbor, Maine, 5:42 p.m.**

"Hello?"

He closed his eyes in silent relief. Thank God. She had answered. "Faith? You in the States?"

"_Dean_?" Her shock was audible.

The hunter spoke fast. "Back from Purgatory. I only got two quarters, so we'll save story time for later. Can you get to Clayton, Louisiana, by tomorrow at sunset?"

"This had better not be some goddamned Crocotta monster," the Slayer insisted, disbelief creeping into her tone.

Huh. Trust her to remember that particularly unpleasant episode in Winchester history. "It's not. It's me," he assured her, his arm twinging painfully. The hunter pressed harder against his glowing forearm. _Hang on, Benny_, he thought forcefully. _Not too much longer now._

"Proof?"

There honestly was not time for this. Luckily, Dean had thought up something in advance. "Nashville. Karaoke. Bob Seger," he said shortly.

"_Dean_?_"_ The disbelief vanished.

"Clayton. Sunset tomorrow. Bring blood."

* * *

**August 29th, 2014, Shreveport, Louisiana, 8:45 a.m.**

"We need to get on the road?"

"Unless you want to make good on whatever you promised the manager, we should probably start moving.'

"Good thought." Faith scurried into the bathroom and began stuffing her toiletries into her bag. "Where you want to head – Kermit?" she called across the motel room.

Joining her, Dean leaned against the faux-granite counter. "I've been thinking. Finally got caught up on all the emails . . . Things've been going to sh-t while I was gone, but frankly, they were sh-t before I left. Sam's in Texas, and it doesn't sound like he'll be moving from there any time soon. I've been stuck in Purgatory for a year of nonstop wading hip-deep in monsters, blood, and more sh-t. So . . . "

"So?" prompted the Slayer when he didn't finish.

"So I'm taking a personal day. Which means we're taking a personal day. It's the tail-end of August, and it's hotter than Satan's armpit. There's those giant water parks they have in Texas – Schlitterbahn, or whatever it's called. If we hurry, we could get hit one by mid-afternoon. I figured we could stop at a Walmart or something along the way, pick up some cheap suits. Increase our risk of dying from skin cancer instead of as demon chow. What'dya think?"

Faith turned over the idea in her mind. "Hmm," she mused as she slid the zipper closed on her duffel. "Oh, what the hell. Why not?"

A slow grin lit up the hunter's features. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Let's take a personal day."

* * *

**April 7th, 2015, Omaha, Nebraska, 5:45 a.m.**

Opening his eyes in Nebraska, the hunter reached for the trashcan beside the bed and spit the pizza out of his mouth. He made a face. Yeah, it was definitely not worth finishing. He found a water bottle in the mini-fridge and drank half of it down in one go. It wasn't like she had been his girlfriend or anything. He didn't need to crawl into a bottle of Johnny Walker to handle this. He was doing fine. He just needed the dreams to stop.

Dean couldn't make up his mind about which dreams were worse – the ones where she lived, or the ones where he watched her die. Last night's installment had been another of the godawful 'if only' dreams, where they both survived a little longer, long enough to have each other's backs. This one had been set in Montana. They'd even had another dog.

Dumbass Disneyland ending or Slasherfest vamp out, both kinds of dreams were like a barrage of sucker punches to the gut. And yet, as much as he dreaded them before and hated them afterwards, there was something to be said for getting to see her again.

He wouldn't admit it – who was there to admit it to besides Sam? – but he missed it. Her wolfish smile in the thick of a fight, when it looked like they were about to lose. Her body pressed against his, the two of them dancing in some grungy bar. Her voice on the other end of the phone, listening or laughing, somehow having the power to make even the Apocalypse – the real one – feel surmountable.

He missed everything, but perhaps, most of all, he missed that no matter what terrible thing he did, he could never truly shock her. At the end of the really bad hunts, the ones where he had sunk so low that he was worse than the nightmares he was hunting, she had been his something to look forward to. No matter how far he fell, she was never out of his reach. Until now.

Acting of their own accord, his fingers pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and began typing in a series of numbers: _2-1-3-5-5-5-8-0-6-1._ Dean waited while the call rang out. One day, that infernal Watcher's Council of hers was going to catch wise and disconnect both the phone and the number. In the meantime . . .

"Hey. This is Faith. You know what to do."

* * *

**March 7th, 2015, Los Angeles, California, 9:00 p.m.**

Feeling like he owed Angel for rescuing him from Buffy, he attempted to continue the conversation. "So, you come to these things often?" the hunter said lamely.

The vampire chuckled darkly. "You don't have to . . . Look, I know you've never liked me much. And that's fine. End of the day, I'm not doing this for you. Or for me. I'm doing it for her."

"Fair enough." In a way, it was a relief, not having to pretend. Dean inhaled deeply, then took another sip at the whiskey. He held the flask up towards the night sky, too obscured with smog and city lights for any stars to be visible.

"To her."

Angel tilted his head to the side, regarding the hunter strangely. "To Faith," he said, the words almost a correction.

"Yeah." Dean drank again. "Like I said, to her."

* * *

**May 1, 2015, El Reno, Oklahoma, 10:25 p.m.**

_Swish. Thunk. Swish. Thunk._ Dean's machete rose from the ground on its own, spinning through the air to easily slice through the necks of the two fangs currently pinning the hunter's shoulders to the cement. _Swish. Thunk._ There went the one holding his legs.

Snarling, the fourth vampire leapt to his feet, turning to face his invisible assailant. As he did so, a faint figure flickered into view over the creature's shoulder. Dean blinked his eyes hazily.

The figure reached forwards with its free hand, its fingers sliding through the vampire's rib cage as though the ribs and muscle were butter. The vampire screamed as the spectral hand tightened once around some internal organ, and then the machete came whistling to separate the vampire's head from its body. As the corpse crumpled to the earth, Dean stared up at his erstwhile savior.

He knew that face. Even coated in a thick layer of goopy green slime, even with her hair wild and tangled, dropping grass and leaves and twigs onto her shoulders, Dean knew that face. Her eyes were narrowed and distant, and when they finally locked on his, all he saw in their dark depths was cold.

"Faith?" The name was ripped, guttural, from his throat, the first time he had spoken it since her death.

Dropping the machete, the transparent form of the woman took a slow step backwards. Already, her outline seemed faint, almost on the brink of disappearing.

Everything clicked into place, like a dislocated joint sliding back into its socket. Dean laughed, a frenzied half-sob of a sound born out of hysteria. "Faith?" he repeated her name and scrambled to his feet. "What the hell are you doing here?"

The woman opened her mouth to speak, but as she did so, the wind swept up behind her. Her outline wavered, then flickered, and then finally was gone.

* * *

**November 13th, 2015, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 11:30 p.m.**

The hunter cleared his throat. "Sam found out. About Gadreel. He doesn't understand why I did it."

"Why _did_ you do it?" asked the ghost curiously.

Dean looked away. He couldn't believe the creature was making him explain this - to her, of all people. "You know why. I just couldn't lose anybody else. And I couldn't lose him. I – I need him."

"Did you tell Sam that?"

He shook his head. "I tried to. Don't think he listened. I said I was gonna go, and he said I should. I . . . I don't think I'm ever gonna be able to fix this one." Hands trembling, he reached for the bottle of vodka only to realize that it was empty.

The ghost surveyed him impassively for a long moment. Finally, she said, "What do you want from me, Dean? There's gotta be something. Or else you wouldn't've called."

The man swallowed, his prominent Adam's apple bobbing up and down against the skin of his throat. He blinked once, and then stared directly into those brown eyes that were somehow just not right. Their gaze always appeared to be focused a little too far away.

"Make me feel something," he said quietly. "I don't care what. Anything - _anything_ is better than this."

* * *

**December 14th, 2015, Lebanon, Kansas, 6:45 p.m.**

"Right," said Dean, clearly not believing a word that she said. "Here's the deal. I keep thinking, and maybe this is my fault."

Faith snorted, and she glanced away from the back of the TV stand long enough to give him a quizzical look. "In what world is my crappy memory your fault?"

The hunter ignored her. He had gone over this half a dozen times in the last two days, and now that he had some semblance of what he wanted to say, he was not going to allow anything to derail him. "I mean," he continued, eyes locked on that almost-transparent face, "I've seen it before – Sam and me, we see it like every couple years at least. You know, ghosts who can't move on because the living won't let them. And, uh, maybe the reason you can't see a light is because I haven't . . . dammit . . . "

Under the crippling weight of the ghost's silent scrutiny, Dean let out a long exhale through pursed lips. This was harder than he'd anticipated – and he'd planned on it being pretty damn hard. Thankfully, Faith said nothing, merely watched him from beneath furrowed eyebrows streaked with slime, her hands tensed into fists by her sides. Slayer girl had always been good about giving him room to breathe.

Finding the threads of his planned speech, he went on, "You and me, well, we were never really much for words. So I guess I never really said . . ."

_God, here came the worst part._

"You were my girl, Faith."

Eyebrows climbing skyward toward her hairline, the ghost widened her eyes dramatically. Words were not necessary to make her meaning clear. The Slayer's skeptical expression spoke volumes.

"I mean, not like that," the hunter amended. "Don't go reading any high school romance crap into this. I guess I just don't know how to say it any other way." He glanced down at his hands in his lap and then looked back into her cold eyes. "But I should have said it. Before."

"So you're telling me this is what - an intervention?" The ghost gazed almost miserably at the bowl of popcorn on the nightstand. She had loved popcorn. He knew she loved popcorn. As well-intentioned as this might have been, it came down a little closer on the side of cruel. "Where you set up snacks and a movie and then you . . . you send me on to the Great Hereafter with some big hurrah? That your plan, Dean?"

"Kind of," the hunter mumbled softly.

Giving up on the dream of popcorn, Faith turned back to him. "Well, it's a damn stupid plan."

* * *

**March 23rd, 2016, Lebanon, Kansas, 8:20 a.m.**

Faith spread her arms out expansively. "What's the point, Kansas?" she asked, her anger suddenly giving way to fatigue. "What's the frigging point to all of this? To me? Unless you let me in on a case, all I do is chill in the stupid Veil. And I'm . . . things . . . it's all slipping.

"Not so much memories," she added at his deepening frown, "but feelings. Like, I remember stuff that happened, but I don't remember why it was so important. You talk about protecting me?" The Slayer laughed again, another broken noise that made Dean's skin crawl. "God, why mess with a system that isn't broken?"

"Hey – "

"No." The Slayer prodded the man's chest with one frozen finger. "I'm the one that protects you, remember? I'm the one who hops up onto my white horse and flies across the ocean to help you out with all of your apocalyptic emotional sh-t. Living or dead. Doesn't seem to matter."

Retreating back to her wall, she continued in a calmer voice, "You know, the other day I found myself wondering – why was it that I came every damn time you called? Why was it that I never called you? Why weren't you the one coming to me?"

"I . . ." The hunter started weakly, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. That had been a low blow, and they both knew it. "I know I wasn't there. I wasn't there in California, and I'm sor – "

"Whoa, Lone Ranger," Faith cut him off. "This isn't about you, actually. It's about me. So hold off on the martyrdom for a second, okay? The other day I forgot, but this morning I remembered. I didn't call because I had things under control," the ghost explained. "Because as much as we argued, I knew Buffy would come through with the Slayer girl power. Because I'd already survived prison and the explosion of the Hellmouth, and honestly, after that nothing seemed to suck too much in comparison."

Faith ran a hand through her hair and sighed. When she spoke again, her tone was softer, gentler. "And why did I get on that damn plane every damn time? Because you needed the backup, genius, and me – I needed you." She snorted.

"Besides, it's not as if I could trust your brother or the feather duster to watch your six. Not like I did. You didn't have to come screeching up in the Batmobile to pay me back; you just had to pick up the phone. But it wasn't about owing," she finished. "Not ever. Now . . ." the woman glanced to the side in search of something to relieve the tension. "How about you show me that pretty new toy of yours? And then," as Dean brought the fabled donkey jawbone further into the light, "whaddya say we blow this place and find us something more fun?"

* * *

**June 16th, 2016, Muncie, Indiana, 1:05 a.m.**

Faith lowered herself onto the cracked asphalt and tugged the collar of her leather jacket closer to her chin. Shifting her knees until she was sitting cross-legged, the Slayer kept her eyes fixed on the back of Sam's too-long hair while he fished in the body's pockets for the keys to the Impala.

With a grunt of effort, the man half-lifted, half-dragged his dead brother into the back seat of the car. It was a long process. Dean Winchester had been neither a short nor a small man. Sam locked his arms around the corpse's chest, underneath the armpits, and hauled him over the leather seats. Tears continued to trail freely down his dirt-streaked cheeks. After all, as far as he knew, there was no one here to judge him now.

Finally, when Sam had his brother's head pillowed on an old junky towel, his face turned up so that it would be visible from the rearview mirror, he closed the door to the backseat and sagged against the gleaming black steel of his brother's car. The hunter wiped his nose on the sleeve of his coat, took two deep shuddering breaths, and stood up. "Okay," he said out loud. "Okay."

As he got behind the wheel, moving with the hesitant stiffness of a rheumatic octogenarian, Faith closed her eyes and relocated to the rear passenger floor board. Careful to remain un-manifested, the ghost drew her knees up to her chin. She sat with her back against the door frame, which put her face within a scanty handful of inches from the bloodied corpse's right shoulder. She reached out with her free hand to trace the stubbled edge of his jaw. Where once touching a human had felt like holding her hands over a bonfire, this body had already begun to cool. Life had gone, taking warmth with it. Her hand fell back to her side.

Faith glanced forward when the Impala's familiar engine grumbled its way into a full-on roar. Sam was still crying, although the waterfall had slowed itself to a trickle.

Funny, that. The Slayer leaned her head against the smooth black cotton-poly of the dead hunter's shoulder. She had imagined this particular moment – or some variation along this theme – over a hundred times since the night she first met a green-eyed stranger in a dumb Western bar. But never once had she imagined this.

Dean Winchester was dead, and she was not devastated or broken or taking the express train to Poltergeist-ville. He was dead, and she didn't feel a damn thing.

* * *

**June 21st, 2016, Naples, Florida, 8:30 a.m.**

Not bothering to answer, the black-eyed creature withdrew a switchblade from the pocket of his worn jeans and flicked it open. Faith watched the four-inch blade out of the corner of her eyes as the demon moved back into her personal space.

"Hold still," he warned unnecessarily, dropping to one knee in front of her.

Faith did not move an inch as the demon slipped the blade of the knife between her ankles and the tough white plastic of the zip tie and jerked upwards. Then he rose to his feet and did the same to the tie around her wrists.

The Slayer rubbed at the skin where the plastic had been – more out of habit than anything else. They hadn't bound her tightly enough to hurt. She looked up from her hands to the demon's dark t-shirt and finally up into his stubbled face and the harsh glare of sunlight.

"I really was just after the car," she said quietly. "Look, Dean, you're done with the white hat hunting stuff. So am I. I'm not headed for Sam or for Buffy or for any of that. I just wanted to see the country – never got around to it last time I was alive." She exhaled. "Was headed for the world's largest rubber band ball out in Lauderhill before y'all caught up with me. It's like seven feet tall, four and a half tons . . ."

The demon rocked back onto his heels. "You really aren't afraid of me," he observed aloud.

"No," Faith replied flatly, finger-combing her hair back into a ponytail.

"I might still kill you."

"Yep." The Slayer pulled the black hair elastic off of her left wrist.

"You don't really care."

She shook her head. "Nope."

Dean sucked his teeth, then said, "Saw a sign for a diner a few miles back. You hungry?"

The dead woman secured her ponytail and gave her hair an experimental toss. "Sure," she said with the ghost of a smile. "I could eat."

* * *

**June 28th, 2016, Morristown, New Jersey, 9:54 p.m.**

Once the door closed behind the departing detective, Faith scooted even further forward, until her hands could reach inside the wide collar of her t-shirt and unhook the safety pin from the fabric of her bra. She opened the pin and then gripped it in her teeth, contorting her body in order to stick the sharp end inside the handcuff keyhole. Thirty seconds after she started working, all gunfire ceased. A moment later, the interrogation door was kicked open.

Dean Winchester strolled in, his black eyes smirking out at her from the depths of a black ski mask. Faith would recognize those bowlegs and that silver-plated handgun anywhere. "Get up," commanded Dean, tugging the ski mask off his face. "We gotta run."

"All the girls in the world, and you came back for me," she said drily, rising to her feet. "I'm flattered. How'd you find me?"

"Crowley's got eyes on everyone," he answered in a curt voice. The demon fished a handcuff key out of his pocket and released her. He gave the Slayer a push towards the door. "Move it, sweetheart."

* * *

**July 5th, 2016, Denver, Colorado, 8:55 p.m.**

Once he finally relinquished the stage to a quartet of bright-eyed coeds and staggered his way across the crowded space towards them, Faith signaled to the bartender for another whiskey. She tossed it back before Dean could reach the bar.

Crowley covered the rim of her glass with his hand. "Going a bit hard, don't you think?"

Faith pushed him away and gestured to the bartender again.

"Hey." Dean grabbed her wrist and pinned it to the counter. "Aren't you going to compliment me on my song?"

The Slayer spun on her heel and glared up at him. "You know," she began in a sweet voice that set Crowley's danger warnings buzzing, "that whole time you were up there, molesting the microphone and mangling the classics, I kept thinking: I loved him once."

Releasing her as if her touch burned him, Dean recoiled backwards. "You _loved_ me?"

His shock gave Faith the leeway she needed to reach over, grab Crowley's umbrella-laden pink drink, and down it in one swallow.

"No, you idiot." She slammed the glass back on the counter. "I loved the frakking microphone stand. Yes, you." Faith glanced at the King of Hell. "Dunno why you're so set on making him your new consort, Crowls. He's dumber than a box of rocks, this one."

Overcoming his surprise, Dean moved back into the Slayer's personal space. His palms grazed her waist. "For what it's worth," he said in a silky voice, "I used to love loving you, too – if you know what I mean."

Faith's glare only intensified. "You need better pick-up lines, Fabio. Or I need more alcohol." She extended her empty glass towards the bartender before either of the demons could stop her. "A lot more alcohol."

* * *

**July 12th, 2016, Coalmont, Colorado, 2:03 p.m.**

The demon scoffed, "You ever gonna be ready? We both know how this ends - you choking on your own goddamned spit."

Pointing the barrel of the Colt at his kneecap, Faith complained, "Can you be quiet for a minute? Or . . . " she turned to him, half-pleading. "Can we just pretend?"

"Like what?" said Dean light-heartedly, pushing the muzzle of the Colt back towards the ground. If pretending was what she wanted, then pretending he would give her. Wasn't like the Slayer was going to last much longer, anyway. "Shoot-out at the OK Corral? Battle of Alcatraz? Bonnie and Clyde? Thelma and Louise?"

Faith grinned weakly. "You'd make a good Louise."

"There's the zombie I know." He unloaded and reloaded the Colt and then placed it back into her blood-stained hands. Already, her skin felt cooler against his. "Here." Dean reached into his duffel for a bottle of Jack Daniels. Unscrewing the cap, he held it up to her lips. "Drink."

* * *

**August 8th, 2016, Lebanon, Kansas, 7:50 p.m.**

"You missed the most fun road trip ever on the way back here."

"Did I?" asked Faith without too much curiosity.

It wasn't worth lying about. "No. Not really. Me, Sam, Buffy, two of her star-crossed exes."

"Sounds like quite the party. Wouldn't've been room for me."

"You're always welcome to sit on my lap." Dean leered at her.

"I'll pass, thanks." The Slayer frowned in thought, twirling an angel blade in her hands, then said, "I want to make a deal."

"I'm listening."

"If I help you out here – let you off the leash – could you do one thing for me?"

"Depends. What do you want?"

Faith crossed into the devil's trap and dropped the cross into the demon's hand. His skin began slowly sizzling, but he did not flinch.

"I want you to destroy this," the woman hissed as the temperature in the room plummeted. "Melt it down, crush the stone to powder, I don't care what it takes. Destroy it."

The demon raised an eyebrow. "You like hanging out in the Veil that much?"

"I want to be _done_, Dean. If you can get me that, I'll let you out of here."

He searched the dark brown eyes, almost imagining that he could see stars in the depths of the empty pupils. Dean didn't bother asking if he could trust her. He knew he could. "Okay, then. Hop to it – before my dear brother gets back."

Nodding, Faith reached down and scratched out the paint-filled lines of the devil's trap with her angel blade. Then she pulled a ghostly bobby pin out of her hair and twisted it into the spelled handcuffs. The manacles fell open with a soft clank, and the ghost stepped backwards.

Dean shoved the necklace into his front jeans pocket, grabbed a wicked-looking knife off of the table and rushed to the door.

"You gonna hold up your side of the bargain?" called Faith after him, sounding almost mournful.

The demon flashed her a chilling smile over his shoulder. "For you, sweetheart, always. Just got a few loose ends to tie up, first."

* * *

**August 9th, 2016, Lebanon, Kansas, 11:00 p.m.**

Taking half a step forward, the ghost announced, "I feel bad, leaving you with all this sh-t."

Dean laughed without humor. It was a jagged sound that scraped and cut at his already bleeding insides. "Oh, darlin', there's always sh-t."

"See?" Faith smiled, a gesture more filled with sorrow than mirth. Momentarily, she was tempted to touch him. "There he is, my knight in flaming armor."

"I swear, if you were corporeal right now, I would smack you for that."

This time, her smile was actually amused. "Come on, Dean. Didn't your daddy teach you never to hit women?"

"Not ghost women. He actually encouraged me to hit those."

"Huh. Time's up," said the ghost quietly as her outline began to fade away. She looked down towards the fire.

"Faith?"

"Huh?" She glanced up from the smoldering coals.

The words caught in his throat, but he forced them out anyway. "You should know. I – I loved you, too."

Her gaze softening, Faith grinned. "Look after yourself, Dean."

Much as he wanted to look away, Dean could not glance down, even as undesired moisture began to burn behind his eyes. "What?" he joked feebly. "Like you won't figure a way to keep doing it for me?"

_. . . tbc . . . _


	2. Billy Tompkins

**A/N:** Thanks to everyone who's read, reviewed, favorited, or followed so far! Generalized spoilers for SPN seasons 8-12, specific spoilers for SPN 12.09, First Blood. This chapter echoes the final chapter of Ramble On - with one BIG difference. ;)

* * *

**October 23rd, 2004, Lumberton, North Carolina, 10:45 p.m. **

"I am not lying down in that," the hunter refused point-blank. He frowned at the woman sprawled out across the dew-laden grass, grinning in a way that suggested she was biologically incapable of taking anything seriously.

"Geez, Dean," Faith Lehane teased, staring up at him. "Don't be such a wuss."

"It's cold, and it's wet," complained the man. "And unless you can magically make a laundromat appear in this one-horse town, I don't got any jeans for tomorrow but these."

Faith rolled her eyes. "We're in frigging North Carolina, man. Not Boston. It ain't that cold. Get down here."

Realizing that she wouldn't let up until he did what she wanted, Dean grumbled, "Fine."

He lowered himself onto the wet earth beside her, close enough that he could feel the warmth emanating from her body but not so close that their shoulders touched. Dean had learned the hard way that when the Slayer started talking with her hands, there was a decent chance that he would get whacked in the face.

They lay there in silence for a few minutes, and then the hunter groused, "Can't we just dig him up, stake him, and get on with it?"

"No," Faith told him. "Because if we finish early, then I have to call Robin about training the little Slayers. If this goes until midnight, I can call him back tomorrow."

"You really dislike him that much?" asked Dean.

"We slept together once."

He glanced over at her curiously. "Any good?"

Shrugging, she said, "First guy after women's prison, so he got extra points for that. I mean, even without grading on a curve, he wasn't too bad, but he got a bit possessive after – like he was gonna fix me." The corners of Faith's mouth turned downwards. "I didn't need that. I can fix my own damn self."

"What's there to fix?" joked the hunter.

"Exactly. That right there is why I like you. Hey, look!" Faith grabbed his wrist and jerked his arm up into the sky, pointing to a slanting line of three faint stars far above them. "Orion!"

The hunter pulled loose. "You know any constellations other than that one? 'Cuz that's the third time you've shown it to me."

"Oh, sure, I know lots," drawled Faith. "There's the Dippers – the Big one, the Little. An' the North Star . . . and that's it. Okay, you got me," the woman admitted. "Maybe I'm not astronomer material."

"No time like now to learn." Dean scooted a little closer on the grass and pointed out some of the other constellations that he knew: Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Canis Minor – the list continued.

"Hey, Dean?" the Slayer wondered tentatively about half a dozen constellations in, when she had already forgotten the names of the first four.

"Yeah?"

"You ever think about do-overs?"

"Like popovers?" he teased, dropping his arm back down to the grass, the astronomy lesson ended for the evening.

Faith clarified, "No, like second chances."

"Maybe," caged Dean. "What's on your mind?"

The Slayer pursed her lips. "Like, for one thing, if I had a do-over, I wouldn't sleep with Robin."

"Okay."

"And I – I think I'd try not to screw up in Sunnydale."

"You regret that?" he asked without judgement.

"Yeah. A lot. I was kind of a messed-up kid."

"_Was_?" teased Dean.

She elbowed him in retaliation. "Shut up. I mean, what would you do over, if you could?"

After a moment, the hunter said quietly, "Sam. The way things went down when he left for Stanford. It was, uh, not good."

Faith kicked her right Doc Marten into his left work boot in a silent gesture of camaraderie.

"Is that your way of saying you wanna knock boots with me?" Dean asked, taking any and every opportunity to lighten the conversation. "I could help you forget all about Robin the possessive ex-lover boy."

"Maybe later. Hush." The Slayer sprang to her feet as something creaked in the earth below them. She threw herself forward into a round-off back handspring double backflip as Bill Tompkins clambered out of his grave in an upwards explosion of dust and grass, her gymnastics culminating in a perfectly-placed stake into the newly risen vampire's heart.

"Ha!" Faith danced backwards in celebration, throwing her arms up into the air. "I did it! With my damn eyes closed!" She continued her happy dance. Thinking aloud, she said, "Maybe next time I'll hold the stake in my teeth."

"Do you always talk to yourself?" grumbled the hunter, his voice suddenly several tones deeper.

Faith whirled around, her brown eyes wide in shock, jerked from the rote repetition of memory into recognition of her actual reality. That line was not part of the nightly script. She stared at the man standing six feet away from her, no longer lying on the grass. Hardly daring to hope, she said, "Dean?"

"Hey." He looked older than he had sixty seconds ago, older even than when she had last seen him in the land of the living. He seemed more tired, too, with deeper lines at the corner of his eyes.

The Slayer rocked back onto her heels. "Are you . . . are you real?" She wouldn't put it past the winged nut-jobs to try to mess with her head - especially after her last escapade with Wes and Ash all the way to the Garden. She had memorized Joshua's cursing for later replay. It was absolutely lovely, how pissed off she could still make the upper management – when they could find her.

"What do you think?" countered Dean. He sounded exhausted.

Her heart had leapt up into her throat, and the blood was pulsating in her ears, but Faith had to be sure before she allowed her hopes to soar too high. "I need you to prove it."

"Okay." Frowning, the man shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "How's this for proof? The night before I died – the _first_ time that I died – well, the first time that I remember, anyway – I fell asleep on the phone while you sang me Puff the Magic Dragon."

Faith winced. "In hindsight, that's kinda embarrassing."

Dean smiled wearily at her. "I didn't mind."

Finally, the Slayer allowed herself to believe. Faith charged forward, throwing herself into him. Going up onto her tip-toes, she wrapped her arms around his neck as the hunter's arms locked about her waist, squeezing so tightly that she could barely breathe. She returned the embrace with equal force and buried her face in the black cotton poly of his military-style jacket.

After a long moment, Faith extricated herself and stepped backwards. "What . . . what happened?" Her unspoken question, _Why are you here?_ hung in the air between them.

"Give me a minute," said Dean roughly. Without waiting for a reply, he pulled her back in, his chin resting on the top of her head. "I haven't done this in four years."

"It's only been that long?" murmured Faith into his jacket. She gave him the requested minute and another besides before pulling away just enough to tilt her head back and look up at him. "Seriously, Dean, what happened?"

The hunter did not meet her eyes. "Sam and I got ourselves into a spot of trouble," he answered slowly. "Only way out was for one of us to die. So we made a deal with a Reaper, and I made her promise to take me instead of Sammy. I - I couldn't let her kill him. I think . . . I think this is her first part of the deal. Not sure how long I have. Probably gonna wake up soon, and then, uh, and then I'll be back. I think." He glanced around the cemetery. "Where is this?"

"You don't remember?" Faith focused on the easy question instead of the potential bomb that he had just dropped. _Deals with Reapers? Damn it, Winchester._

"We've spent a lot of nights in a lot of cemeteries," he reminded her.

That was fair enough. "It's some place in North Carolina. I forget the name. October two thousand and four, I think."

Dean whistled through his teeth. "Oh-four, huh? That's . . . that was a while back."

"Yeah," agreed Faith. She tugged on his jacket sleeve. "So, uh, any idea how long you got here? Before your Reaper friend -"

"Not my friend," Dean interrupted her quickly. "And no, I got no clue."

"Right, so you said. You wanna – you wanna sit down?"

"Okay."

Moving in awkward tandem, they sat, their backs propped against a family gravestone of ruby red granite, and leaned against each other. Dean snuck another sideways look at the Slayer. He could still hardly believe she was there.

With a deep inhale, the hunter started explaining, beginning the exhausting saga of the end of the Mark, Rowena, the Book of the Damned, killing Death, the Darkness, Amara, Sam getting trapped in the Cage, Castiel willfully signing himself over to Lucifer, the blasted Devil himself, Chuck being God, Metatron – the whole sh-tty train wreck that had become his life since he had snapped the Slayer's neck and then melted down the necklace tethering her to earth.

He told her of his mother returned from the dead and of the interfering British Men of Letters. Here, Faith interrupted him long enough to scoff at their similarity to the more irritating versions of her own detested Watcher's Council. He ended with recounting the events that led to his capture by the Secret Service; Sam's and his stay in super-secret Appalachian Guantanamo; and his slow slide into catatonia until he had finally thought to contact Billie.

As he spoke, he felt some of his perpetual fatigue fading away. Deep in his bones, Dean had needed this. No one listened like Faith did – not to him, anyway. She stayed silent for the most part, occasionally making soft sounds of sympathy, encouragement, and, rarely, derision. When he finished, Dean allowed his words to trail into silence.

Sensing his diffidence, Faith elbowed him gently in the ribs. "Hey, bozo. Aren't you going to ask what I've been up to?"

The hunter gazed up at the star-strewn sky above them. "Revolutionizing Heaven, no doubt."

Faith snickered. He wasn't far wrong. "I found Ash and the Roadhouse, like you told me. We've got a weekly poker game going on there now. There's a lot of people who will want to see you – if you can stick around long enough. Ellen, Jo, Rufus, this peppy redhead called Charlie, and oh, yeah, an old codger who goes by the name of Bobby Singer."

Dean swallowed against the sudden lump in his throat. "And none of your people?"

"Wesley drops in off and on," Faith said slowly. "And I see my first Watcher, Diana, every now and then. I thought about going to check in on Buffy's mom once, but I decided against it. Mostly though, I've been exploring the Axis. Made it all the way to the Garden not too long ago – it's hard to track time here."

"Busy bee."

The Slayer shrugged. "Gotta do something. A girl can only sleep for so long."

"Do you? Sleep, I mean?"

Exhaling, she told him, "There's a place here . . . one of my memories. It's the scrapyard at Bobby's. The afternoon after you came back from the dead. THE first time," she clarified with a rueful laugh. "It's warm, and it's quiet. When I first got here, all I did was sleep there and stake vamps here. It's not far – we can take the road outside the cemetery if you want."

"I'd like that." Dean grimaced. "I haven't seen sunshine in, well, way too long." Rising, he pulled her to her feet. "Lead the way."

They climbed over the wrought iron spiked fence and set off down the gravel road. Somewhere back in the woods was the hidden Impala, but Faith preferred the walk. It felt more real. Besides, it was less than a mile to the salvage yard.

But instead of Singer Salvage, when they rounded the bend in the road, they found themselves in a halfway-decent hotel room. Dean was sitting in a chair at the lone table, watching the Slayer from her position in the bathroom doorway. Faith reached up and felt her hair. It was carefully twisted into a severe French braid. She examined the pile of gloves, snow boots, and other wintery accoutrements by the door, and slowly it all started to make sense. Wisconsin. Two thousand and twelve. The morning after they had killed the Sliver Cat. The Slayer raised her eyebrows. This was not one of her usual places.

Dean smiled, pleasantly surprised.

"This is _your_ happy memory?" wondered Faith. She took a step forward, half-driven by the essence of the memory that still existed. In new memories, you always found yourself repeating the original events. On a subconscious level, you wanted to follow the past, wherever it sent you, wherever it took you.

The hunter seemed to realize this as much as she did, for his green eyes gleamed with amusement when she dropped herself gracelessly into his lap.

"It was a good morning." Dean brushed an errant lock of wispy hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ear. "Had three of my favorite things in it: you, me, sex . . ."

Faith snorted and rested her hands on his shoulders. He was awfully close, close enough that Faith could easily kiss him if she wanted to. She wasn't sure that she wanted to. "Classy, dude."

"Just telling the truth."

"Don't get me wrong, that sex was good, but not like 'make a film and rewatch it' good."

"You didn't think it was film-worthy?" snickered Dean.

"You did?" Faith was skeptical.

"Maybe not our best," he admitted. Then, in a more serious voice, he said, "I told you that night that you . . . that you were the one thing that made sense. The one thing that stayed the same."

His eyes were locked on hers, and Faith felt mildly uncomfortable. Revisiting that confession was a little too much – too much for him to say and too much for her to hear.

"I was ready to go," murmured Dean, the words hovering fragile in the inches of air between them. "When I asked Death to off me. When I had Rowena power me up as a soul bomb. When Sam and I got locked up by Uncle Sam. I think -" he hesitated briefly and then continued, "I think after . . . after I get Sam somewhere safe, when Billie takes me . . . I think I'm ready."

"Dean – "

However the Slayer had been planning on ending her sentence, Dean did not want to hear it. He cut her off with a gruff, "I missed you, Faith. I never stopped missing you."

Still concerned, still uncomfortable, she replied automatically, "I missed you, too."

"Good." Relieved at having gotten that off his chest, Dean stood, lifting both of them out of the chair and setting her back on the carpet. He glanced thoughtfully at the bed before coming to a decision. "Can you take me to the yard?" he asked her. "I need the sun. Before this whole thing ends. Please."

"Of course," Faith promised him. "We just need to find the road, wherever it is in this place."

They looked at each other, then said in unison, "The map!"

Dean crouched over the pile of outerwear near the door and began rifling in his coat pockets for the Wisconsin road map that he had squirreled away somewhere in there years and years before.

The Slayer cleared her throat. It was time, maybe, to address the elephant in the room. "So I guess . . . You showing up in my memories, me walking into yours without using the Roadhouse or one of the uh, major roads . . . Does that – I mean, would that make us . . . soulmates?"

"Looks like," agreed Dean. "Aha!" He straightened in triumph, the folded map clutched in his hand. Catching sight of the thoughtful look on her face, he prompted, "You disappointed?"

"No," said Faith slowly. "Wait . . ." She let the word trial off into silence. "Didn't you and Sam also have access to each other's Heavens? That time those redneck hunters decided to be a pair of giant dumbasses and shoot you?"

" . . . Yes?" Dean's exhausted brain was not moving quite fast enough to put two and two together.

She continued, "Does this mean . . . I mean to say . . . Am I stuck in a soulmate triangle with you and your brother?"

The hunter looked up from unfolding the map and frowned. His neurons were beginning to fire a little more quickly, and he had an uncomfortable idea of where this was headed. "Faith . . ."

"Our would you say it's more like a soulmate three-way?" the woman finished with a mischievous grin.

Dean winced. "Aaaand now I'm never gonna be able to clean my brain out. Thanks for that."

"You're welcome, cowboy. No, I'm not disappointed. Are you?" Faith asked with a trace of hesitancy.

"Actually . . ." drawled Dean. He smiled, and for a moment his constant weariness disappeared, and he was the twenty-five-year-old with the gorgeous green eyes who she had decided to work off her post-destruction of Sunnydale tension on, a hundred thousand heartaches ago. "Actually, I was kinda hoping for it."

"Sam might not like it."

"Well, he'll just have to deal, won't he?" Grin firmly in place, the hunter reached out and grabbed her hand. "Come on, Boston. Let's go find us some sunshine."

As her fingers closed around his, Faith opened her mouth to say something sarcastic and mocking, when they were both surrounded by a curtain of blinding white light and a roar like an oncoming freight train.

When the glare and the ringing in her ears faded, the Slayer was once again sitting on the cold, dark, cemetery grass, while Billy Tompkins clawed his way out of his grave and began lumbering lop-sidedly towards her. Faith glanced to her left, where Dean had just been, only to see his once-again much younger counterpart, who was just finishing his sentence with "- could help you forget all about Robin the possessive ex-lover boy."

Rising to her feet, Faith whipped a stake out of her leather jacket. "Maybe later," she replied automatically. "Hi, Billy."

She stepped forward, stake in hand, mind whirring over what had just happened, and with the ease of knowing exactly each and every step the newly risen vampire was going to take, solved the problem of Billy Tompkins for the seven hundred and seventy-third time.

Once the vampire was nothing more than a light blanket of ash over the autumn ground, Faith plopped herself onto the nearest tombstone. The Slayer hunched over in a horrific slouch and dangled her feet off the side of the headstone, then kicked her boot heels aimlessly against the granite.

_Well. That was something_, thought Faith, tapping her stake on her knee. In thirty minutes, Billy Tompkins would rise once more from the grave, ripe for his seven hundred and seventy-fourth staking.

Pondering this, the Slayer sighed the sigh of the perpetually bored with the afterlife.

"Frak me."

. . . tbc . . .


	3. After Life, pt 1

**A/N:** Thanks to everyone who's been reading so far! Hope you continue to enjoy it! Spoilers ahead for SPN 12.09, First Blood.

* * *

**January 30th, 2019, Secret Service Detention Facility, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado **

Dean awoke with a gasp and a hacking cough. His hands scrabbled against cool metal until they found the edges of the slab beneath him. Gulping air down into his starved lungs, the hunter pushed himself into a sitting position. He glanced around hurriedly, taking in the familiar dingy tile and stainless steel of what could only be a government morgue.

A few feet away, Sam was already awake and upright on his own autopsy table. Something stronger than air hunger burned at the back of Dean's throat. The plan had succeeded.

"You good?" asked his little brother, looking concerned, as Dean continued to hawk and gasp like a fish on a riverbank.

"Yeah." The older man inhaled deeply, attempting to clear his mind of the cemetery and the Slayer.

Whatever he had expected when he had talked a Reaper into this little scheme, ending up in Faith Lehane's Heaven for three hours had _not_ been it. Even as a part of his mind strove to capture the already-fading memories to preserve them, the greater weight of Dean's consciousness shoved the images firmly down into the darkness at the back of his brain. If he could retrieve them again later, great. If not, he'd just have the word _soulmate_ to stew about for the next forever or so. _What the Hell?_

"I've been better," he went on, when he felt like he could breathe halfway to normal. "I've been worse."

Sam eased himself gently down from the metal gurney, careful not to let his long limbs knock against the steel. "Looks like it worked," he said with the faintest hint of a smile and a twinge of hope.

All Slayer-related afterlife fantasies firmly locked down, Dean grunted, "So far."

Somewhere in the not-too far-off distance, a door slammed. The hunter instantly straightened, sliding off the autopsy table and turning to face the morgue's door. Sam's body language mirrored his.

Heart rate accelerating, he murmured to his brother, "Okay, Sammy. Here we go."

* * *

**February 2019, Harvelle's Roadhouse, the Axis Mundi, Heaven**

Faith Lehane glanced up from the quarter-deck of cards in her left hand and stared at the man playing opposite her, who was currently peering at the six cards spread out face down on the beer- and grease-stained table between them. Eyeing the dark brown scruff that covered his jaw and the lower half of his face, she mentally calculated him to be somewhere near the nineteen-and-a-half o'clock shadow point. The Slayer weighed her decision for another moment, while the other player flipped over one of the cards in front of him. The queen of spades.

"Something happened yesterday," the woman murmured, dropping her voice. Although their table was tucked away into a far, isolated corner of the old tavern, a girl never knew who might be listening. Walls had ears, especially celestial walls.

Moreover, while Faith trusted the other occupants of the Roadhouse tonight - the mentally-gifted and haircut-challenged Ash behind the bar; Pamela the seer playing a game of one-on-one pool against the impossibly gorgeous Jo who_ certainly_ did not make Faith feel insecure; Jo's mother and father tucked into their own booth in another shadowy corner, doing things no one wanted to think too hard about; hot-rot-red-haired Charlie typing furiously away at a laptop in yet another attempt to hack into a heavenly mainframe – as much as she liked these people, Faith did not much fancy the absolute chaos that would erupt if anyone else heard what she was about to say.

Sliding the queen of spades atop the queen of diamonds on the growing pile of cards in the center of the table, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce gestured towards the Slayer, indicating that it was her turn. "Yesterday?" he prompted quietly, his voice as posh and smooth and plummy and irritating as it had been the day they first met, nearly twenty years ago.

Faith rifled through the endless cards in her hands. She had been forced to pick up the deck three turns ago, and she still had absolutely no idea of what she actually held. "Yesterday or the other day. Some point between the last time we saw each other and now."

"Ah." The difficulties of tracking time in Heaven was a frequent subject of belly-aching sessions. Wesley watched as she laid the king of clubs atop his queen. "And what was this something?"

"I saw Dean Winchester. A, uh, different one," she added.

"Hmm. A new memory appeared?" The man turned over one of the two remaining cards in front of him to reveal the ten of diamonds. Smiling to himself, he placed the ten on top of the king, and then corralled the stack of cards into better order with his hands before setting them aside. His smile widening, Wesley turned over the final card, the four of hearts, and slapped it down enthusiastically in the place where the stack had been. "I win. Again," he announced, shoving all the cards across the table towards Faith. "Shuffle please."

Groaning loudly for anyone who might be listening in, the Slayer gathered the cards towards her before answering his question. "Not a new memory. This was, uh, the real McCoy."

His tone remaining firmly neutral, the man queried, "Dean Winchester's in Heaven?"

"He was," Faith muttered, keeping her eyes on the cards.

"Hmm." Wesley made a non-committal noise.

This time, the woman looked up to find her once-upon-a-time Watcher giving her a look fully crafted of one hundred percent unimpresséd-ness.

"What?" barked the Slayer. She made a bridge of half the deck in each hand and flicked them together. Satisfied, Faith began dealing out three cards each to herself and to the man seated across from her. Then she dealt three face down in front of each of them, with an additional three face up on top of those. She placed the remaining stack squarely in the center of the table and flipped the topmost card over to reveal the six of diamonds. "Go."

Wesley studied his cards thoughtfully before placing the seven of spades atop the six and drawing a replacement from the deck. "I didn't say anything."

"Well, you're definitely thinking something." Feeling the need for retaliation, Faith placed a king on top of Wesley's seven and drew a card. "Spill."

"I believe the going rate for thoughts is generally at least a penny?" The Englishman frowned at her king. "That wasn't very nice," he observed mildly. "Happily . . ." He topped the king with a five and a bit of a nasty smirk.

Faith immediately played a nine only for the man to extend a hand to stop her.

"Ah ah ah," he scolded primly, reminding the Slayer why sometimes he deserved a giant ass-kicking. "You have to play a three, four, or wild card," he reminded her.

"I taught you this game. And now you use it against me." She flipped over the top card on the deck - the jack of hearts. "Dammit." Grumbling, Faith collected the pile of already-played cards and added it into her hand. "Why can't you suck at something for once?"

Smiling like the rat-bastard that he was, Wesley also flipped over the top card to reveal the four of clubs. "I possess many talents, Faith. Including but not limited to highly proficient marksmanship, an encyclopedic knowledge of demons, a genius-level intellect, a ready wit in many a foreign tongue, and a true, natural-born gift for dance. Of course, as you never grow tired of reminding me, I am also a giant dork, nerd, priss, ponce, and generalized all-around pain in your ass. The next turn is yours, by the way."

The Slayer glanced up from the half-sorted cards in her hand, stared at the four with excessive concentration, and then re-played the initial six of diamonds. "Up yours, Pryce."

They had come a long way, she reflected, as Wesley cheerfully gave her the finger and once again flipped the top card off the deck instead of using a card from his hand. Wanker probably had a couple of tens or twos that he was saving to screw her over with later. Jerkwad.

At no point during her time on earth would Faith ever have predicted that she would be spending a considerable portion of her afterlife playing card games and trash-talking with Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. In fact, if polled, she would either have claimed that 'after-lifes were for losers' or pointed out all the signs indicating that she would spend the eternities being roasted slowly over a spit while being flayed alive.

Heaven had never been on the menu for a murderer. And certainly the man that she had attempted to torture to death simply in order to prove a point to someone else had not been a featured part of Faith's imagined afterlife – not unless he was the one rotating the spit or wielding the knife. It was only his turn, after all.

Initially, when Faith had grown tired of her own little pocket of Heaven and had wandered her way along the Axis Mundi to the Roadhouse, she had met mostly strangers. Some of their names were familiar enough to her – Ash, hot Ellen Harvelle, her hot daughter Jo, Pamela the hot seer, Charlie the also hot hacker – more women than men, for whatever that was worth.

At first, the Slayer had been content to listen at the backs of groups, to nurse a cold beer quietly or make up the fourth in a game of pool, while she observed the others. On the rare occasions that Bobby Singer left his armchair and trash television, Faith participated more, but all in all, she thought she might be happy to sit on the sidelines.

But drifting into the forgotten rear of the crowd was not to be, for eventually amongst the trickle of adventurous humanity who tracked the Axis Mundi was her former Watcher. Over a decade had passed since his own death before Wesley Wyndam-Pryce stumbled upon the Roadhouse. Like so many before him, he had looked less than star-struck with the place. Unlike the majority of the others, however, he had taken one look at Faith and refused to walk away without playing twenty questions first.

That first conversation had started out terribly awkward, and Faith hadn't been sure how to address the herd of pachyderms in the room. Thankfully, for better or worse, Wesley barely made it through the first twelve of his twenty questions when he downed his third shot of rotgut and commented, "I've forgiven you, you know," right as the Slayer was struggling to get her crap together and apologize.

Faith had managed to splutter something out in reply, but then she had to stumble away in order to go lay down and stare at the ceiling of the women's bathroom for a long while. She lay there, counting ceiling tiles, until Jo came in with a pool cue and reminded the Slayer that it was her turn again. After that particular game had ended, Wesley offered to be on her team when Pamela tapped out. And that, the Slayer thought wryly, had been more or less that.

Perhaps they stuck together because they did not really know any of the other regulars at the Roadhouse. Perhaps they stuck together because of some cosmic destiny, of being bound in blood and fate and more wrong choices than Dante's entire inferno. Or, in what Faith figured to be most likely, they stuck together because no one else was willing to drink and snark and fight about all the painful things and then deal out a game of Speed or Egyptian Ratscrew as if nothing else had happened.

She jerked out of her reverie in time to place her seven of spades on top of Wesley's seven of clubs. "Here." The Slayer fished in her wallet for a quarter and plopped the coin alongside the two sevens. "Whole twenty-five pennies' worth there. What're you thinking?"

The Englishman pocketed the quarter, eyed the sevens, and drew a card before playing another jack. "Dean Winchester's visiting you in Heaven."

"You talk about it like it's a big deal. It's not." Faith glanced through the cards in her hand. Didn't she have her own jack somewhere in this mess?

"Mmm." Wesley dropped his voice a fraction further. "I acknowledge that having not met the gentleman in question, I may be the outlier here. But – and I know you'll correct me if I'm wrong – isn't your friend something of a big deal around these parts?"

"Something like that," she admitted grudgingly.

"I thought so. And what's more significant, he entered your heaven without the Axis or angel guidance or . . . outside help?"

This was a question Faith was more than happy to dodge. Instead, she retorted, "You're just jealous I've never come over to see your bachelor pad."

Ignoring her feeble attempt at humor, the man wondered aloud, "Do you know why he died?"

"Yes." The woman pursed her lips and turned over the top card. It was yet another seven. Frowning, she picked up the deck. "Go."

"You look concerned."

"That's 'cause my luck sucks tonight," she snapped back. As the former Watcher played a nine, she added, "Hate to say, but you're right, Wes. I am concerned a bit. Not so much by the Heaven thing or the death thing – Dean kinda tends to die a lot. Sam, too. Like, more than Buffy, even."

"So I've gathered."

"Thing is, when I saw him, Dean seemed, uh kinda death-wish heavy."

Having already received several earfuls about Winchesters and death wishes, Wesley raised a single eyebrow. "More so than usual?"

Faith huffed out a brief laugh. "Yeah. Like you an' me might lose the election to him for captain and co-captain of the death wish squad this year." She looked up from the cards in her hands and remarked, "I think he's in trouble."

"Isn't everyone we knew on earth? Constantly?" To the man's credit, his tone was only seventy percent bitter. He flipped the top card over yet again, and yet again was successful.

_Damn him, _thought Faith. "Again, Wes, you're not wrong, but this didn't feel like Apocalypse stuff or whatever to me this time. It felt like, oh, I dunno, _internal_ trouble?"

"Hmm." Wesley played two kings on Faith's single jack.

The Slayer drew a card, sighed, and gathered the already-played deck into her growing pile. "Ugh. You suck."

"So you've said. What do you want to do about it?"

"Kick your ass, for starters."

"No, about the other – "

"I dunno, man. I need more information. _We _need more information. Feels like we're always flying blind up here. You got any thoughts in that genius-dork head of yours?"

Despite his overall generalized pain-in-the-ass-ness, Faith Lehane would be the first to admit that the one thing Wesley was always good for was ideas. They finished another round of Idiot (or Sh-thead, depending on which of them was talking), made their excuses to Ash and company, and slipped out into the starlit darkness that awaited outside the back door of the Roadhouse.

The gravel drive outside the Roadhouse was not really the Axis – well, if Faith were being hoenst, it was more like the front step onto the metaphorical porch that led to the spoke of the Axis that the Roadhouse was located on – but it was quiet here, and they could talk more fully. She preferred to include as few people as possible in the details of her celestial expeditions. The fewer who knew, the fewer who might possibly blab to the angels about her escape routes the next time that things went sideways. It was practically impossible to tell time in Heaven, but Faith figured that events tended to go sideways about twenty percent of the time. Which, frankly, was a number that she could live with, for that meant that eighty percent of the time, no one was there to stop her.

Watcher and Slayer stood in silence for a brief while as they each checked their own personal arsenals. In theory, Heaven was a paradise, but that did not stop either of them from packing more firepower than they had on earth. Faith had access to both Bobby Singer's Salvage Yard and to Dean Winchester's Impala, after all, and Wesley's happiest memories tended to heavily feature the Research and Development division of Wolfram and Hart.

As a consequence, they were each constantly finding new toys to play with. The Slayer wore no less than two stakes, a revolver with silver bullets, and half a dozen knives (one Bowie, one silver, one stiletto, one dipped in lamb's blood, one blessed with holy water, and the celestial copy of Sam's demon-shanking blade). Her ultimate goal was to obtain an angel sword, but so far, no dice. Wesley had – well, whatever Wesley was feeling like packing at the time. Usually Angel's fancy forearm-stake-launcher set up, a sword at his hip, two semi-automatic handguns in a shoulder holster, and a pouch with various spell ingredients.

"Well," began the man once the inventory was complete. He often seemed quite a good deal more relaxed out on the Axis than he did in the Roadhouse. If Faith was being brutally honest with herself, so was she. Other people tended to have unrealistic expectations of her; Wesley was one of the very few who had no expectations of her at all. "Where to?"

The Slayer wrenched a much-creased piece of folded up paper from the inside pocket of her leather jacket and crouched down to spread it out on the ground. Wesley stooped over her and flicked a lighter. In the wavering flame, they stared down at the product of their many expeditions – a slowly growing map of Heaven, sketched in ball point ink in both their handwritings, with many revisions and additions. At the center of the page was a circle with the legend "The Garden," and a wheel of spokes poked out from it in all directions. Along the spokes, cramped names had been scribbled.

"I want to go back to the Garden, again," Faith murmured, staring down at the circle. "I think we need to ask Joshua some questions, and . . ."

"And?" Wesley prompted her.

"Here, sit by me." Faith lifted the map and plopped gracelessly onto the dirty concrete step, where she gestured for the man to join her. He sat down, and they leaned in together to peer at the piece of paper in the woman's lap. "Look, Wes, here's the thing." Faith traced out along the spokes of the wheel with her finger. "Let's say that Heaven's like a big-ass maze. Here's the Axis, and here's all the ways we know to travel from one highway to the next, I guess you could call it the, uh, spirit roads. You with me?"

This analogy was one they used frequently. "I'm following."

"Good. But on the other hand, you know, there's all the access paths and hallways that the angels use."

"Which you've also found," Wesley filled in, recalling some of the Slayer's more lurid heavenly adventures that she had confessed previously – attempting to find Bobby Singer's personal Heaven in order to invite him to the party, succeeding in finding said personal Heaven, sneaking nearly all the way to the Heavenly dungeons to wreak havoc on Metatron – the Slayer had retained her teenage aversion to sitting still or following instructions.

"Right," Faith went on. "That's how I used to sneak out, back when my supervisory angel used to actually check in on me. But now . . ."

"Yes?" prompted Wesley.

"I haven't seen her in a while, like not since we convinced Ash to take his old jeep free-wheeling with us all the way up the Garden that first time. Something's – " she paused, searching for a good analogy that would suit her co-conspirator's refined sensibilities. Thankfully, his constant nerd quotations had finally rubbed off on her enough for some of them to stick in her memory. "Something's rotten in the state of Denmark, Wes."

"Did you have something specific in mind, or is it more just a general state of rottenness? Perhaps one triggered by seeing your paramour?"

The Slayer shook her head. "Clearly I haven't hit you enough lately if you're still using words like 'paramour.'"

"Public school education. Can't shake it."

"By which you mean fancy-pants private boarding schools, right?"

"That would be correct."

"Said it before, and I'll say it again. You're a ponce, Wesley. No, it's not that Dean showed up. Whatever that means. Good chance that it wasn't really even the real him."

Wesley cleared his throat. "Can't bullsh-t me, Faith."

"Okay, yeah. It was him. But that's not the weird thing I was talking about. We made it all the way to the Garden without anyone trying to stop us. It was only after we got there and found Joshua that the anthill exploded. Doesn't that seem weird to you?"

As it had been Wesley's first and farthest grand celestial road trip, he had been surprised, but had not had the experience to make sweeping judgements. "Yes, but I wasn't sure – "

"It's weird, man. Trust me on this. It's _weird_. When I first got here, they were catching me far sooner, nearly every time I stepped out of my box."

"And how did you do it before – sneak out, I mean?"

"Easy," Faith shrugged. "I just stole the keys off the angel they sent to babysit me."

That was new information. The Englishman straightened up from leaning towards her. "You could have mentioned that before," he reproved.

The Slayer shrugged again. "We all got secrets, Wes," she reminded him. "I don't go asking for yours."

Wesley snorted. "Pants on fire, Lehane. You ask for my secrets whenever you get bored, which seems to be developing into a constant occurrence." He sorted this new information into place. "Do you still have those keys?"

"Only one," admitted the woman. "And it's just good for the one thing – opening a door out of _my_ Heaven. I've tried using it like everywhere else, but no joy."

"Hmm," the former Watcher mused. "Ideally, you know, that would be the next best step. Exploring the employee hallways."

"I know," she agreed. "Looks like I'm going to just have to start that part as a big solo mission, until I can get to the W's." Her face brightened momentarily. "Unless you're in the P's? Oh, please, God, I hope you're in the P's."

"If we follow the basic principles of alphabetical order, it will likely be the W's."

"Figures. Sucks, but figures." The Slayer rose to her feet, folding up the map and tucking it away once again into the safety of her jacket. She stepped backwards, moving towards the old shed that sat a few yards out behind the Roadhouse. "What say you, Wes? Wanna go a few rounds first? Before we get down to business?"

Wesley followed her through the door to the shed, currently dangling off its hinges. Once inside the pitch-black building, he struck up a flame again from his lighter and set it to the fraying wick of a candle that Faith had brought along from the teenage bachelor pad that had been Klepto Steve's place in one of her older memories.

In the faint light, they stripped themselves of jackets and bags, of swords and firearms. No point in shooting one another by accident. Intentionally, now, that would be a whole 'nother matter.

"Okay," said Faith, rolling her shoulders back and rubbing her hands together, "let's go."

Watcher eyed Slayer as they eased around one another in a tight circle. He could feel every one of her footfalls, the woman's heavy boots planting themselves a little too firmly against the cold earth underfoot. Their gazes were locked, dark brown onto stormy blue, as each waited for the other to take the first step.

It was an odd little ritual of theirs, one that took place nearly every time they met at the Roadhouse – provided one of them didn't get drunk enough to provoke a knife fight inside the old bar first. To everyone but Faith's surprise, Wesley had started their first real set-to, one night when he almost chiseled the barbed wire tattoo off of her arm, blinded by tequila and offering to baptize the Slayer free again of any lingering demonic influence left by the long-since-vanished Kakistos.

In hindsight, the man never could quite decide which fact was more terrifying: that he had wanted to go after Faith with a carving knife like a bloody American holiday turkey or that the mostly sober Slayer had made no move to stop him.

As he continued to circle towards his right, listening to Lehane's breathing and waiting for the subtle changes that would mark an impending attack, Wesley reflected that he knew, with certainty, how tonight would end. One of them would make a false step, and the violence would begin.

Blows would be exchanged, eyes blackened, and any number of small and exquisitely painful joints jammed and dislocated until finally they ended up on the ground, while someone pinned the other down mercilessly, the close contact barely enough to satisfy their celestial not-bodies into returning to the empty saccharine drivel that some unfathomable eternal algorithm had decided counted as their "happiest memories."

It was unfathomable to the Englishman how any sane person could be happy when surrounded by meaningless shadows of those they had cared for in life. Especially when those shadows ceaselessly reenacted the same scenes over and over until they lost any and all meaning that they had ever possessed. None of the figures in his memories were their true selves – not his mother, not his - his Fred – and that robbed them of any sympathy or emotional connection that Wesley might have felt for them. It was all very pointless, exhausting, and, yes, boring – one of the few sentiments that Wesley and the woman currently longing to beat his brain into the ground agreed on.

The Slayer must have grown tired of his wool-gathering, for she darted to the right in a hairs' breadth of a second when he expected her to dart to the left. Faith slipped her leg behind his, grabbed the man by the shoulders, and flipped him over her outstretched leg onto the ground. Wesley rolled over onto his back as she attempted to kick him in the chest. He grabbed the Slayer's boot and wrenched her ankle to the side with his right arm, while at the same time kicking out at her other knee, and knocking it out from under her.

Faith went down into the dirt with a hiss and a curse, and then lunged forward, landing blows with closed fists against Wesley's ribs. Right – left – right – left – she hammered away, and the man knew this would definitely leave a bruise. He got a hand in between them, grabbed the Slayer by the throat, and pushed her away, flipping their positions until she was beneath and he was on top.

Grabbing her wrists, Wesley slammed them against the earth, then pinioned her struggling legs by kneeling directly on top of her, one knee digging painfully into each hip joint. He had learned the move from Bobby Singer on one of the older man's few excursions to the Roadhouse. It was a good way to apply pressure to a hip wound while you were busy placing a tourniquet somewhere else, and Wesley also knew from personal experience (having been the hunter's demonstration dummy) that if you got your knees lodged against the femoral artery and nerve just right, it hurt like hell.

"You're getting slow," he informed the woman as she writhed beneath him, her pupils wide with something that neither of them was interested in exploring. "And predictable."

"I'm still thinking about Denmark." She thrashed half-heartedly, making no real effort to unseat him. After all, even in the afterlife, human strength alone was not enough to hold a Slayer, and they both knew it. The unspoken rule of their little wrestling match was simple: he or she who successfully and properly pinned the other first got to enjoy the ride up top.

This was as far as they ever went, and it was certainly as far as Wesley had any desire to go, but it was enough to let off steam. Just a moment to break the tension and monotony of being surrounded by memories of the woman he loved but never being close to the woman herself. In a dark corner of his heart, he envied the Slayer her encounter with Dean Winchester. Brief and concerning thought it might have been, at least she had seen something _real_.

Rather than comment on any of that, he enquired, "And in your thinking, did you find something else rotten, something beyond your grappling skills?"

"Never do stand-up comedy, public school boy. You'd suck at it. Thing is, my brain's stuck on like this one question."

"Which is?"

Faith dropped her voice to a whisper and pushed up onto her elbows, until her mouth nearly brushed the man's ear. The words scorched against his skin as she breathed, "Wesley, where have all the angels gone?"


	4. After Life, pt 2

**A/N:** A thousand apologies for taking such a long time to post! I promise that I have not abandoned this story, and I will not abandon it. Life got a rather busy, and then I wanted to make sure that I had at least one extra chapter written before I started posting again. But anyway, here's a rather long chapter to make it up to you!

* * *

After another three rounds of slugging it out in the dirty shed out behind the Roadhouse, Faith took the empty, starlit darkness of the Axis back to her own personal Heaven. The Slayer followed the twists and turns of the cracked blacktop road, her feet leading her directly to her memory of a long-ago Valentine's Day with Steve, one of her many disappointing teenage boyfriends. He hadn't been that bad, for a kleptomaniac. But, far more importantly, Steve's place was the only one of Faith's memories that had the dual benefits of containing a working shower and not containing her mother.

Much to the woman's dismay, any hope of keeping the new, Wisconsin hotel memory had vanished along with the real Dean Winchester. Unfortunately, this meant that she was once again stuck using the mold-infested bathroom back at Steve's place and sharing her clean-up time with the funky pink bacteria slowly invading their way up the plastic shower curtain. Faith figured that even microbes probably got some kind of afterlife. She only hoped that these were having more of a party than she was.

Sweeping back the prokaryotic utopia-encrusted plastic, the Slayer twisted the knob to 'cold' - the only working side - locked the door firmly behind her just in case memory-Steve got the urge to wander in, and stripped down. She stepped over the cracked lip of the fiberglass tub and tugged the pink-tinged curtain into place. Resisting the urge to hunch her shoulders under the icy spray, Faith rinsed off the dust of the Roadhouse and the shed, physical misery being the best and most reliable de-lusting that she could manage at the moment.

It was not unusual to find herself feeling hot and bothered after fighting it out with Wesley. Lately, getting worked up while working out had started happening with disturbing regularity.

Still, as far as Faith was concerned, there was nothing to be done about it. The thought of actually listening to her hormones and sleeping with her former Watcher was one that she would not touch with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole - as was the idea of scratching that particular itch with either a memory-constructed teenage Steve or an equally memory-constructed but thankfully not-a-teenager Dean Winchester.

Without viable options, the Slayer and the freezing cold shower spent quite a bit of quality time together. After all, this was not the first time that Faith had been forced to try celibacy on for size.

Objectivity restored, she grabbed a folded pair of jeans from the top of Steve's washing machine and dressed in a clean copy of the exact same outfit that she had been wearing earlier at the Roadhouse. In fashion as in other things, Heaven did not allow for much variation.

Sliding back into her leather jacket, Faith strode quickly into the small apartment kitchen, ignoring Steve's thousandth rendition of a speech about Valentines and flowers and reservations. It was a speech that haunted her in her sleep, no matter where she went. The woman found a much-abused oil change brochure laying on the center of the kitchen table right where she had left it. She picked up the wrinkled piece of paper and focused on another crappy apartment.

Three jolting steps forward later, she walked into a badly-carpeted living room. To her left, a broken-down couch was littered with balding Barbie doll knock-offs. The combination of a crooning Sinatra and the reek of burning spaghetti filled the air. Only through sheer determination did the Slayer manage to keep this memory from shoving her into a pair of child's footed pajamas with cartoon rabbits printed across them. Tired as she might be of jeans, leather jacket, and boots, they were vastly superior to bunnies.

Not pausing to take in the view of the apartment where she had spent half of her childhood, Faith withdrew a heavy steel skeleton key from the inner lining of her leather jacket and headed for the front door. She shoved the key into the space between the door and its frame, clicked her boot heels together three times just in case, and wrenched the key to the left.

The door swung inwards, and the Slayer stepped around the edge to see a familiar white hallway devoid of any decorations or inhabitants and lined with endless locked doors, identical to the one she had just exited. Although the hallway had no visible light source, it was glaringly bright.

Faith carefully locked the door to her personal heaven behind her and tucked her key away into its secret pocket, adding a bland gray pantsuit to her mental wishlist. It would lessen her chances of discovery by at least sixty percent.

Pursing her lips, the woman frowned. Shortly after she arrived in Heaven, she had managed to sneak an angel blade out of Alirael's office. Alirael, formerly one of the accountant angels, had been assigned to Faith's section of the L's for her sins after Metatron's little coup.

The Slayer smiled grimly to herself at the memory. She had given the prim little book-keeping angel Hell until Alirael had bargained to stay off Faith's neck in exchange for a little peace. Regretfully, returning the angel blade had been a non-negotiable part of said bargain.

In the meanwhile, until Faith managed to steal another angelic sword, she could do nothing but hope the six knives, two stakes, and revolver stashed in various places around her person would be enough to tide her over until she reached Wesley, miles of hallway away from her current location. She tapped the folded-up edge of her carefully drawn master map of the Axis Mundi in her jacket pocket once for luck.

_Okay, feather brains,_ she thought to herself, settling into her long, easy patrol stride that could cover cemeteries upon cemeteries before her legs began to tire. _Where are you all hiding out_?

* * *

**February 16th, 2019, the Bunker, Lebanon, Kansas**

Dean sat frozen, his fingers hovering over the keyboard of the laptop in front of him. In a small window at the top left of the screen, a rerun of an epic fantasy battle was playing out, but for once his focus was on a blank email message rather than Danaerys Targaeryen. A single thought rang repeatedly in his ears, clarion clear and accusatory: _This. Is. Stupid._

It _was_ stupid. That, at least, was beyond argument. Dean traced the thin, raised outline of the 'H' key with his right index finger and glared at the screen; it was the closest he could get to glaring at himself right now.

This, this moment right here was approaching one of the most ridiculous things that he had ever done - or had been ever tempted to do - and Dean Winchester could remember an entire dictionary's worth of ridiculous things, but he was beginning to run out of options. Pressure was building up inside him, like coal stoking up a steam engine, and G-d help him, somebody had broken the frakking release valve.

He had tried all the usual things - getting blackout drunk in his favorite dive bar in Lebanon; driving two towns over in his FBI suit to pick up chicks at one of the fancier places that attracted a college degree kind of crowd; sneaking out and taking down a vampire nest without telling anyone about it; convincing Sam that they needed to practice sparring and then knocking his younger brother onto his ass a time or two - but nothing had worked quite the way he had been hoping for.

And how could it, Dean admitted to himself grimly, narrowing his eyes further at the computer screen, when he couldn't tell any of them - not a single damn one of them - about what was really bothering him?

_Soulmates._

That was the other word churning around his head, when he stopped moving for long enough to let the quiet hit him. What a stupid word. What a damn stupid word, invented by damn stupid people who wrote damn stupid novels and damn stupid films to make a damn stupid buck off of even stupider, eternally damned suckers. Worst damn almost-birthday present of his life.

Had it been something that he was hoping for? He had told the Slayer that it was, but Dean was hard-pressed to look back and find a time when he had thought about the possibility at all.

If he had taken the time to imagine what was on the other side of "lights out, permanently," he might have hope for something like that. Dean had hoped for a lot of things in the days prior to that little trip, locked up in the Rockies with only a series of tally marks, a food tray, and the occasional interrogation for company.

But if he was being completely honest with himself, Dean would admit that he tried not to think too much about the Slayer. There was a lot there to think about. Mostly good, some bad, much of it painful.

Two years without even her ghost for company, had not done much to dull the jagged edges where that g-ddamned Fyarrl demon had excised Faith Lehane out of his life. But since there was nothing to be done about it, Dean had wrapped up everything beyond the bare facts, carefully placed it into an iron box, and shoved it away somewhere deep down in the far depths of his mind. A place so remote that even he had to struggle to reach it.

There was no point to the thinking. No point in endlessly regretting the way things ended, his hands snapping her neck or setting fire to the turquoise cross that had tethered her to life, tethered her to him. No point in bringing her up, not when he could half-hear her sarcastic response to the constantly evolving sh-t show that was the British chapter of the Men of Letters. No point to missing her, no point in dialing out ten digits that went nowhere. No point to any of it at all.

On the whole, he believed that he did a fair job of acting unfazed when Sam or Cass mentioned reaching out to the Slayer organization or when her mini-Me's, Becka and Lily, called him once a month to check in. Those girls had some kind of alternating schedule on their phones - he could not be convinced otherwise - and they always remembered both his and Sam's birthdays and sent cards and the occasional package of cookies at Christmas. They were constantly reminding him to drop in the next time he passed through Cleveland.

One relief in all of this was knowing that the girls were okay. Lily was teaching classes at some fine arts high school these days and she participated in most of the regional shows that came through the city. Becka was pregnant with her first baby and confidently predicted that she would be a partner in her engineering firm by the time she reached thirty-three. Her husband, whose name Dean made a point of regularly forgetting, wasn't too much of an idiot.

Recently, Becka and her man had started learning how to refurbish classic cars, a hobby that Dean was only too willing to discuss over something delicious out of a crock pot while Sam and Lily talked nerdy theatre things and Becka asked him silently with her eyes if he thought his brother would ever make a move and ask Lily out. The age difference wasn't so much now, all things considered. Of course, if Sam did that, then Dean would need to give him the shovel talk, and that was an uncomfortable thought that reminded him far too much of - of -

Dean reached for the glass of bourbon resting next to his computer and took a long, slow sip. His eyes darted away to the line of Lannister soldiers being roasted by Drogon, and his angry introspection was interrupted by a moment of pity. Poor bastards.

This . . .this was all so frakking stupid. He should have known better than to get so involved. He _had_ known better. You shouldn't rely on other people too much, not when your name was Dean Winchester. Dragging somebody else into your affairs only got them dead.

The hunter clicked out of the email window and maximized the Battle of the Goldroad. Raising his glass of bourbon, he drained the amber liquid in one swallow. Piece by piece, Dean shoved everything back into its box, the loss and confusion and self-loathing all smashed in together.

He would be fine. Dumbass wishful thinking about soulmates aside, he would be fine. He just needed to move on and to forget.

If only it wasn't such a damned hard thing to slay vampires and not think of Vampire Slayers.

* * *

In all of his fourteen-odd years of death, only one memory that belonged to Wesley Wyndam-Pryce had retained its aura of perfection. The memory in question was a foggy morning during the end of his school days. All classes had been cancelled due to a rampant stomach virus that had decimated attendance on campus and which had, to everyone's great surprise, missed Wesley.

Silence filled the deserted courtyards and hallways, and he had spent the morning alone in blessed silence in his favorite corner of the library, sitting in his favorite wingback armchair with a pair of cushions squashed just so, a thermos of Earl Grey balanced against his leg, and a pile of two-hundred-year-old treatises on demonic prophecies on the rickety wooden end table beside him.

What a glorious day that had been! Atmosphere and peace aside, it had been the day when at last Wesley successfully untangled and laid bare the very significant shortcomings of Watcher Edmund Brisbane of 1780's Manchester. It had been a practically perfect day, and it had led to a practically perfect final paper. And, in what was nothing short of a minor miracle, despite the repetitive passing of years and Wesley's growing frustrations with the general state of the afterlife, that one foggy morning continued to be his perfect day.

His perfect day, that was, until one rainy afternoon when the door to his study nook opened with a loud creak, and a familiar mass of brown hair poked its way in.

"Oh, no," groaned the Englishman, whose tea had finally cooled to the ideal sipping temperature. "Now?"

The head and shoulders of Faith Lehane twisted from side to side as the woman took a quick look around her former Watcher's library. Shaking her head, the Slayer tutted at him. "Yes, Wesley. _Now_."

Wesley sighed. Alas, even perfect days had to end sometime. "Very well," he replied in mildly anguished tones.

With habitual care, he gently set the priceless folio back on the side table and rose to his feet, thermos in hand. One of the few persistent perks of Heaven was the inability to ruin fragile texts. There had been a long period of time in his youth and young adulthood when Wesley would have been tempted to bargain away at least a part of his soul in order to obtain such heady powers. "But I'm bringing my tea," he added, clutching the precious thermos close.

"Angels don't drink tea," Faith reminded him, her voice half-snide, half-urgent. Congenitally impatient, she jerked her head towards the door. "C'mon, let's go."

Dejected, Wesley squashed the hope of finishing his cuppa. "Of course they don't."

In search of potential solutions, the woman offered, "You could always chug it."

"_Chug it_?" he echoed, aghast.

Faith gave an exasperated huff. "Whatever. Just focus, Pryce."

With one last, miserable sip, the man abandoned his thermos on the end table. He followed the Slayer out through the library door and into a hallway filled with nearly-blinding white light.

"So this is it?" he asked in wonder.

"Yep." She tapped one heavy-soled toe against the sparkling white tile. "This is it - the big angel speedway."

Wesley gave the Slayer a good, long stare. She seemed less sleep-deprived and angry than when he had last seen her at the Roadhouse. Of course, subverting authority tended to have that effect on Lehane. He surveyed the worn canvas bag dangling from her left shoulder. "You brought supplies?"

Stepping further away from Wesley's door, Lehane hefted the strap of the bag higher up on her shoulder. "Stopped by Bobby's on the way here," she explained. "Needed a beer. Ended up borrowing some more reading material."

"How much of his library do you have by now?"

"Not that much."

By which, Wesley concurred, she had begged, borrowed, and stolen at least a third of the old hunter's books.

"Speaking of libraries, nice digs back there."

"Thank you. So - where now?"

"Here's the plan." The Slayer eyed his formal university uniform with blatant appreciation. She gestured to his freshly ironed suit jacket and pinstriped tie. "As you can see," she drawled, "my outfit is not exactly Heaven-dress code appropriate. You on the other hand . . ."

Wesley had a sense of where this was going. He grabbed the woman's left arm, just above the elbow in an attempt to get into character.

"Escaped again, Lehane?" he sneered in a colder, even more prim tone than usual. "Well. We shall see about putting a stop to these escapades of yours."

He began striding at full speed down the great white hall and tugged the woman along behind him.

"Uh, _Westiel_?" said the Slayer, attempting and failing to hide a snigger.

"What?" Wesley turned on her, his face wrenched halfway between a glower and a grimace. That pseudonym was atrocious and _had _to go.

Grinning like a fool, Faith pointed in the opposite direction. "My Heaven's that way."

* * *

**March 27th, 2019, Ringgold, Nebraska **

The demanding ringing of his cellphone dragged Dean's attention downwards and away from his cracked windshield. Hellhound attack or no hellhound attack, Sam was going to pay for having dinged up his baby with multiple hours of elbow grease. Dean had more than half a mind to make his too-tall little brother be the one who hammered out the dents in the hood this time. But on second thought, that would require someone other than himself to be up under the hood of his Chevy, and even if it was Sam, the very thought made Dean more that a little uncomfortable.

Recognizing the familiar number calling in, the hunter frowned. There was no good reason for Becka Viglione to be calling him. As far as he knew, today was not anyone's birthday. He was not expecting any prank calls, there had not been any crises, and the Slayer-turned-engineer was in between car remodels. Lucky her. Dean hoped there was not a problem but felt little optimism. In his experience, there was usually a problem.

"You gonna answer that?" wondered Sam from the passenger seat. He reached out and turned down the stereo.

Dean reminded himself for the fiftieth time that his little brother had not intended to damage the car and as such was not deserving of strangling before he inhaled and flicked his thumb across the phone screen. "Hello?"

"Heyyyyyyyyyy."

Ah. Lily Price. Vampire Slayer and proud Actor's Equity member. No one else had such a gift for turning one letter into thirty. A fraction of the stress seeped out of Dean's spine. Lily never started off phone calls like a ditzy teenager if there was trouble.

"Hey, kid. There a reason you stole Beck's phone?"

Another cheery voice joined in the conversation, a bit crackly but still clear enough to understand. "Evening, Dean. I'm here, too. You got Sam with you?"

Two peppy Slayers generally equaled increased relaxation and fewer problems for Dean. Well, it did when the peppy Slayers in question were these two. It would be another thing altogether if it was Buffy and -

Unwilling to finish that train of thought, he tapped on the speaker icon and held the phone out towards his Sasquatch of a sibling. "Sammy, it's your fan club."

"Don't be rude, Dean," Becka tutted at him. "We're also your fan club."

"That's a horrifying thought."

"Better than our actual fan club, though," Sam noted ruefully. "At least better than the ones on the internet."

Dean's thoughts went directly to Becky Rosen without passing 'Go' or collecting two hundred dollars. He very consciously did not bring up that particular disaster, however. He was a little mad at Sam, but not World War Three levels of mad.

"How're kicks?" asked Lily, before the silence could become awkward.

"And by kicks," Becka interrupted quickly, "we mean any word on your missing pregnant lady?"

"She's got to have some kind of help," growled Dean, who had begun to hope that this might not be a business call after all and resented the subject change.

"As the resident pregnant lady myself, I can agree with that," Becka concurred.

With a quick glance at his brother, Sam attempted to divert the topic of conversation. "How's that going, Becka?"

"Miserable. Growing a human baby is exhausting. They say the second trimester gets better, but I'm not sure if I believe them."

"That husband of yours treating you right?" Dean cut in.

"Answer's the same as it always is," replied the engineer in a sugar sweet voice with a razor sharp edge. She retaliated with, "How's your mom, boys?"

"Fine," was the monosyllabic response.

She kept pressing. "And your new British friends?"

"Not our friends."

"We asked Giles for you," Lily said hurriedly, playing interference, "but he didn't have much new information. Sounds like the Men of Letters and the Watcher's Council have been rivals for centuries. Giles says it's because your people were jealous that the Watchers had access to the Slayers and the Men of Letters folks didn't."

"Not my people," grunted Dean.

"Well, technically, they kinda are," said Sam awkwardly. "You know, that whole legacy thing. Or I guess maybe we were supposed to be their people?"

"Yeah, anyway . . ." drawled Lily, who had a gift for sensing the dark winds of oncoming Winchester arguments, "check your email, Sam."

"Is this about that animated prairie dog thing you sent me?"

Dean whirled to stare at his brother. "What animated prairie dog thing?" he demanded, reluctantly returning his eyes to the road.

"That, and a fifty dollar gift card to Olive Garden," Becka reminded Sam. "I hope you're in the mood for pasta. I've been craving manicotti, and since I can't really eat soft cheeses right now, I figured y'all could do the devouring for me."

"The fearsome Winchesters, devourers of Ricotta," intoned Lily.

That earned her a handful of snorted chuckles from the Impala

"Hang on," Dean protested. "How come you sent him the pasta card? And that, uh, prairie dog thing?"

Unspoken was the thought,_ Why didn't you send _me_ a prairie dog thing?_ Although, knowing the girls, it was probably a singing prairie dog thing that flirted hard with the fine line between annoying and obnoxious.

"Because Lily and I lost a bet."

This was more confusing, not less. "What bet?" wondered Dean, while Sam said, "Which one?"

"You all have more than one going?" the older man questioned, disliking being left out.

"Not anymore," Lily replied. "Just an old one from forever ago."

"This might actually work out better for you all," mused Becka. "But before we get too far down the hobbit hole of Sam's spurious betting history, I wanted to say - don't forget, you two, if you need anything -"

"And we mean _anything_," interjected Lily.

"Anything at all," the other Slayer continued, "please call us. We know people. If you need someone to go terrorize your Men of Letters anti-friends in London, Spike'll do it. In a non-existent heartbeat, he'll do it."

"Aaaand, since Angel and Buffy broke up again, even Angel's in the mood for Hulk-smashing things."

"They _what_?" demanded both Winchesters in unison.

"They got back together? _Again_?" said Sam. "Wait - I remember now. _That_ was my bet? That she'd date Angel next and not Spike?"

"See? Told you he'd remember eventually," a self-satisfied Becka commented.

"Are you freaking kidding me?" grunted Dean.

"Settle in, gentlemen," Lily soothed, slipping into one of her stage voices, each word filled with promises. "It's story time."

* * *

Walking quickly forwards, one hallway intersection at a time, passing identical, nondescript door after door after door until the names blurred into a sea of black, serif-printed letters, Wesley and Faith made it safely past the V's, the U's, the T's, the S's, and even the R's.

There had been a brief sticky moment halfway through the Q's, when Faith's Slayer senses picked up on a hint of far-away footfalls. No words were required, only a quick exchange of glances and they darted down a side passage. The two intrepid explorers scrunched up against a wall, making themselves as small as they could while the Watcher reminded Faith in a strangled whisper that Don Quixote was a fictional character rather than a historical figure, and that they should not waste precious time looking for his door.

Once the faint footsteps faltered away into nothing, they resumed their journey, and Faith kept up an impressive scowl in Wesley's general direction all the way through the P's and the O's.

It was the N's where trouble hit.

They were engaged in a hissing, heated discussion of the utility for hunting for Nostradamus - Wesley thought yes, Faith thought no - and allowed themselves to get too distracted to pick up on the click-click-clicking of heels coming up behind them.

There was a pause and a gasp, "Lehane!"

Faith's guts sank down past the soles of her shoes. She recognized that voice. The Slayer whirled to see a short, trim blonde in a navy skirt suit, matching kitten heels, and a pair of tortoiseshell cat's eye glasses, staring at them with her mouth gaping wide open.

"Sh-t," muttered the Slayer under her breath. "Hi, Al. Long time no see."

The angel Alirael closed her mouth and squinted angrily at the two humans. "Lehane," she hissed in a furious whisper, "what are you doing out? _We. Had. A. Deal._ And who is that?" She nodded towards Wesley.

"Deal was, you don't cause me problems, I don't cause you problems," Faith answered quickly, intentionally skipping over the angel's last question. "Hate to break it to you, Alirael, but I ain't got nothing but problems.

"Now," she grabbed Wesley's hand in hers and gave it a single hard squeeze in warning, "I'm just going home, so there's nothing to discipline me over. We don't need to make a thing out of this."

Launching herself forwards, the Slayer began sprinting down the hallway. She tugged Wesley along behind her. If they could round the corner, she could try her key in one of the doors. Faith cursed herself for an idiot. If she'd remembered the oil change brochure, they could just skip over to the Axis and lose the angel there.

Alirael was faster than Faith had remembered. She closed the distance between them in four steps, caught ahold of Wesley, and dragged the Watcher away from Faith. The angel tapped two fingers against his forehead, and Wesley went down like a stone, his eyes rolling back up into his skull.

"_Frak_," the woman grumbled. She whirled around and doubled back. Nothing for it now but the hard way.

"Who is this?" Alirael repeated, but Faith was not listening.

She charged ahead and tackled the angel, her shoulder slamming solidly into the angel's solar plexus, her hands grabbing onto every inch of the skirt suit that she could reach and patting it down frantically. There had to be an angel blade in there somewhere.

"_Get. Off. Me,_" snarled Alirael. She clenched her left hand into a fist, and an invisible force lifted the Slayer away from her and flung her against the nearest wall with the weight of an invisible freight train that refused to stop. Her duffel filled with books crashed to the floor and slid across the smooth tile, coming to a stop next to Wesley's unconscious body.

As her head slammed back into the whitewashed wall, Faith accidentally bit down on her tongue. Her ears rang, and her lungs refused to work properly. Coppery blood leaked out around the corners of her mouth, and she struggled to swallow it down. Licking her lips, the Slayer tasted the familiar acrid battery tang of hemoglobin. "You've powered up, Blondie."

"These are difficult times. I have been learning on a curve, as you mortals say." Alirael advanced on her, hand open, palm facing out, and the pressure around the human woman increased until there was an excruciating pop and Faith felt a trickle of fluid pooling in the shell of her ears. "I am only going to ask this one more time. Who is your friend? He's clearly human," she said dismissively. "But who is he?"

Faith smiled a crimson-stained smile. Glancing over the angel's shoulder for a brief second, she watched as Wesley's eyelids slowly fluttered open. "Alirael, I'm hurt. I thought you'd read my file."

"I have better things to do than memorize every insignificant detail in a human's file."

"You get a promotion? That it? No one else is around, so finally they give Little Miss Numbers the big corner office?" The Slayer was searching for any soft spot in the angel's armor, any place that she could poke her fingers in and _dig. _She just needed to get the angel nice and pissed off, keep her well and truly distracted. "Tell me something, Alirael. Where are all the other angels? They only playing the JV squad these days?" she taunted.

"They're _gone_," Alirael hissed. She curved her fingers into a claw, and Faith's throat closed in on itself.

Eyes tearing up, the woman gasped for air.

"_Dying._" With each word, the angel's fingers grew closer and closer together, and Faith's air supply diminished more and more.

"_The fall. Metatron. Amara. Luci _-" her hand clenched into a tight fist, and the Slayer's throat swelled shut. "_Lucifer._"

"Al, please," gasped Faith with the little oxygen that remained. Behind Alirael's back, Wesley was gingerly pushing himself onto his hands and knees, his blue eyes hard, his face grim.

The angel continued as if she had not heard her. "There has been _great _attrition."

"Please," begged the Slayer hoarsely. She attempted to cough or swallow, but could not manage it. Blood continued to ooze from the bite wound in her tongue, and she wondered if this was what drowning felt like.

"Why should I? We angels are killing ourselves to keep the lights on here." Alirael waved her free hand at the bright white hallway all around them. "All for you ungrateful humans. I've told Joshua a thousand times - if he wants to solve our problems, the only solution is to use our resources wisely. Instead of burning angel energy, we should just consume all these _useless_ human souls."

Faith made a gargling sound, choking on the blood and saliva slipping down her throat. Her brown eyes darted around wildly as Wesley rose to his feet and lifted the heavy duffel up off the floor.

"And _you_ -" the angel redirected her gaze, staring at the woman with molten hatred, "you are the worst and most useless of the lot. You can ask any angel in the Heavens. Everyone knows that Faith Lehane only escaped Hell because she opened her legs for Dean Winchester."

Harnessing the last of her energy, the Slayer hawked up a glob of red-tinged saliva and spit it directly onto the angel's foot.

Alirael snarled. "You _stupid_ mud monkey." The last vestiges of her civil veneer dropped away as she twisted the fingers of her other hand. A lightning-sharp, tearing pain exploded in Faith's stomach, and she retched, spraying blood across the floor. "I have had enough of you. Joshua and Naomi are wrong. You have outlived your use as a bargaining chip."

_Thud!_ Wesley brought the duffel bag down directly onto the top of the angel's head. The latest withdrawal from Bobby Singer's library hit Alirael like a ton of books, and she dropped to her knees, momentarily stunned.

With the angel's concentration broken, Faith's abdominal pain stopped instantly, and her throat finally opened again. She slid down the wall into a crouch, gulping lungfuls of fresh air down into her burning chest. The Slayer clutched at her stomach with one hand. With the other, she swiped at her bloody mouth and began to trace a curving symbol on floor beside her, her work hidden from view by her boots. "Wes," she croaked and then added, "Sword."

The Watcher slammed his thirty pound bag of books onto the angel's head for a second time and then a third, in quick succession. It was only a briefly temporizing measure, but it would do to keep her off balance while he patted the outline of her suit jacket down in search of an angel blade. He looked over at Faith and shook his head. No dice.

Distraction was dangerous. Alirael surged to her feet, waving one hand and TK'ing Wesley through the air and against the opposite wall. "You dare -"

"Hey, Al," Faith called out, the words scraping like daggers against her inflamed throat. "Eat sh-t." She slapped her blood-streaked palm against the sigil on the floor beside her.

There came a blinding flash of light and an unearthly shriek. When the light faded, the hallway was free of furious angels, and Faith and Wesley were once again alone.

The Englishman was the first to rise. Suit jacket irrevocably torn, he extended a hand and pulled the Slayer to her feet, then picked up the book bag.

"Thought those would come in handy," the Slayer whispered, a feeble attempt at humor. "We gotta get outta here, Wes. That'll have summoned every angel in Heaven. Sh-t, man, I'm sorry. - "

"I have an idea. Do you still have the map?"

"Yes." Faith rifled through the pockets of her jacket until she found the creased folded piece of paper that contained their painstakingly-drawn map of the Axis Mundi. She wordlessly extended it in his direction.

Wesley took the paper and opened it fully. "Think," he told her. "It's a map. And if it's a map . . ."

"We can get to the Axis."

"It's worth a try. Here, lean on me."

"Okay."

Duffel on one shoulder, Slayer slumping against the other, Wesley stared fixedly at the map, imagining the vast expanse of the Axis Mundi opening up in front of him. He took one staggering step forward in the glaringly bright hallway, and then another, and then they were treading on the dark, cold gravel of the Axis. Distant stars glittered faintly overhead.

"Can you walk?" he asked Faith as he tore the map in half and handed her the upper section.

The woman straightened upright. "Yes."

"Good. Then use this to get to your place. I'll use the other half. Meet at the Roadhouse after . . ." Wesley paused briefly in thought, "I suppose ten cycles of a three-hour memory should do it."

"Got it." Faith squinted at the fragmented map in her hand. "See you on the other side."

And, setting off in opposite directions from one another, they vanished back into their own memories.

Faith hurtled back into her mother's apartment, this time shoved into the dreaded rabbit pajamas. She kicked a handful of broken dolls under the couch until the floor was clear enough to reveal a small carpeted map of a town, one that had been made for Hot Wheels-sized cars. The Slayer hopped onto the map with both feet and then fell hard onto her ass, landing on the sun-warmed metal of a half-rusted truck bed.

She opened her eyes to the bright glow of the South Dakota summer sun, just in time to hear an amused voice say, "Yawning again?"

"Oh, G-d," exhaled the woman in relief, as the young Dean Winchester to her right grinned at her in amusement and continued a conversation that Faith knew by heart.

"What, Bobby's floor not comfortable enough for you?" he teased, green eyes laughing and happy.

"Can't you for once say something else?" Faith complained, not for the first time.

"Probably. I told you we could turf Sam onto the floor."

Rubbing the back of her forearm against her mouth, the Slayer attempted to scrape away some of the dried blood. Her throat hurt like she had attempted to drink broken glass. In a while, once she was sure the coast was clear, she might head to her cemetery memory to find a glass of beer.

"Huh. Well, if you're in that much need of shut-eye," memory-Dean continued without any input from her, "why don't you grab fifty winks, then? We don't need to be anywhere for a minute. Bobby'll holler if he finds anything in those books." The hunter casually reached out to tug Faith's gray tank top strap back up to the top of her shoulder. Then he pulled her closer, until the Slayer was more than halfway laying in his lap.

There was no point in resisting, and Faith had no desire to resist. She leaned against his side, her cheek resting against the worn cotton of his thin t-shirt. That had been their first time researching the dick angels. Half an eternity had passed since then, but the angels had certainly retained all their dickishness - and then some.

A combination of lingering pain, exhaustion, and discouragement combined to overpower her better judgement, and the Slayer gave in to the memory. She closed her eyes. If she imagined hard enough, she could almost pretended that this was real.

"This is dumb," she said, the torn map still clutched tightly in her hand as she repeated the words of an Indian summer long since past. Her throat spasmed, and she coughed. "I'm a little worried that if I fall asleep, you'll go away again."

"Faith - "

"I didn't want you to die," she interrupted, and then broke the script, "but I'm not sure I want to spend forever stuck with you, either. Reliving the same damn things like some stupid hamster on a wheel."

The hunter's hand brushed against her arm. "Vampires. Which one'd win in a fight? Your kind or mine?"

"And people keep frakking thinking that I like belong to you or something, which is just the frakking worst. 'Cause I don't belong to anybody. Ever."

"Not in the sunlight," the memory recited.

Faith kept her eyes closed as she lost the fight against another bout of coughing. "This is pointless. You can't even hear me."

"You gotta use your imagination," he said, the same way he had said a thousand times.

"I _am_ using my imagination," she grumbled.

The memory-Dean put a single index finger against her lips, and Faith stifled the urge to bite him.

"I'm here, okay?" the memory said easily, the same way he had that distant day in September 2008.

"No, you're not," Faith insisted, although she knew it was useless to argue. This was not the real Dean - this was not the real anything - and he could not hear her. "And I don't . . ."

He spoke over the top of her. "I'm here, you're here, we're both here. So talk to me about vampires."

Throat burning, stomach aching, the Slayer crumpled the map in her hand and wished that it could be that simple.


	5. After Life, pt 3

**A/N: **Currently planning on updating every weekend. Shout out to Astra Across the Stars. Spoilers ahead for SPN 12.15, "Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell."

* * *

Bathed in September sunshine, Faith waited for the coast to clear. She whiled away the hours in a perpetually fading tank top, debating the very nature of vampires and demons until her eyes crossed themselves of their own accord. Jeans rolled up past her knees, she kicked off her boots, leaving them abandoned near the tailgate of the rusting pick-up bed.

Beside her, Memory-Dean was persistent, obnoxious, and repetitive. Every argument, each point and counterpoint, was as rehearsed as the final performance of some Broadway monolith. Faith hated that. And yet she still enjoyed the sound of his voice. It remained one of the few reassurances that once upon a time the Slayer had been that most elusive of things - content.

She took four naps and six long walks around the salvage yard to kill even more time. One stop at the trunk of the Impala to stock up on bullets led to an hour and a half of emptying her revolver into the passenger side of a beat-up 1997 GMC Sierra. When it came to projectiles, Faith ultimately preferred her crossbow. Perhaps some small part of that was due to a lingering memory of Buffy's anti-gun tirades. On the whole, however, she reckoned that bows were just more fun, requiring a higher degree of marksmanship.

Not that she would have ever told a hunter that particular thought. Retrieving her casings from the dusty earth underfoot, Faith tossed the lot of them into the bed of the Sierra and reloaded her sidepiece one last time. Good aim was important - longbow or crossbow, pistol or Uzi. And of course, a Slayer had to keep up with the Winchesters. Or so it had gone when she was alive and things had actually mattered.

When she grew weary of blasting away dangling car parts, the Slayer hoofed it back to the old Ford where Dean was watching the clouds go by. She joined him in looking up at the misshapen cotton balls slowly meandering their way across the sky. As the hunter daydreamed aloud, Faith ran through her mental list of supplies.

After the disastrous encounter with Alirael, she was more convinced than ever that she needed an angel blade - and she needed one _stat_. That was at the very top of her list, closely followed by a boring pantsuit, satellite television, a new set of memories to explore, and, to the Slayer's mild embarrassment, a whiteboard.

Faith wasn't quite sure how, exactly, but the whiteboard urge was definitely Andrew's fault. It had to be. He was the one who had first inoculated her with his nerdiness through too-close proximity. He had made her watch Battlestar Galactica, he had introduced her to the concept of quiche, and if anyone could be blamed for her lingering desire for a large, easily wipeable space to sketch out her plans in blue, green, red, and black, it had to be Andrew.

The Slayer gave it yet another round of endless repeated conversation before hopping out of the Ford, darting back up to Bobby Singer's front porch to retrieve her jacket, and heading out to the Roadhouse.

Wesley was waiting for her at their usual table with a bottle of whiskey, a pair of almost clean shot glasses, and their deck of cards. "Well?" he said, raising a single eyebrow as she walked in.

"Hope you haven't been here too long," came the brusque answer. Faith took note of the heavy duffel filled with the books looted from Bobby's on the chair next to the Englishman. She pulled her chair back, the legs scraping painfully across the wooden floor, and dropped down into the seat. "Thanks for bringing that back." She nodded towards the books. "Any trouble?" she asked in a lowered voice.

"None. And you? How is your, uh, throat?"

Not bothering with a glass, Faith took a long drink straight out of the whiskey bottle. She set it back on the table and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, ignoring the irritated look that Wesley was sending her. "A little burn never hurt anybody."

"Mmph." Wesley brandished a cloth napkin from seemingly out of nowhere and wiped the neck of the bottle down thoroughly. "I thought we had the table manner talk?"

They had, and the Slayer had made it quite clear that her behavior was secondary to choice, not ignorance. Faith changed the subject. "Alirael didn't have a sword on her," she pointed out with frustration, "so we're no closer on that front. But we did get some more information," she admitted begrudgingly. "Looks like Joshua's still calling the shots. And their numbers haven't recovered - if anything, they've gotten worse."

"Not only that." Wesley's face lit up with a smile of deep self-satisfaction. He reached into his pocket and opened his hand to dangle his new treasure: a thick, large copper ring adorned with a baker's dozen worth of silver and gold skeleton keys. "Look what I found in her pockets."

"You beautiful bastard," breathed the Slayer, stretching her arm out to touch the keys with near-trembling fingertips. She glanced up at him, brown eyes wide and appreciative. "Well done, Wes. I mean, I could kiss you right now. If unshaven Englishmen were my type."

"Unshaven Englishmen are everyone's type," Wesley replied confidently. He held up a hand before she could fire back. "But please don't kiss me. You'd fall hopelessly in love, and then where would we be?"

She laughed. "Screwed. Without a doubt, we'd be screwed." _And we'd also be screwing_. Faith kept that last thought to herself. "So . . ." she held her hand out and waited expectantly for him to drop the keys into it.

With as dignified an eye-roll as he could manage, Wesley did so. "So," he echoed.

Faith curled her fingers around the heavy key ring, the metal cold against her skin. "Wanna take these beauties for a spin?"

"You're joking."

"Maybe." She stroked the keys in her palm one last time and then passed them back across the table. "Keep these for me?"

Wesley gave her a silent, querying look.

"You took down an angel with a book bag," noted the Slayer. "I think that kind of makes us_ '_friends' now." She scrunched her nose in mock distaste.

"Shocking thought," said Wes dryly.

Faith rolled her eyes at him.

"Enough 'touchy feely' stuff." Wesley's tone subtly added the air quotes for him. "I'll go put our orders in with Ash. You want cheeseburgers or nachos?"

Faith caught the plural on 'cheeseburgers' and grinned. He knew her so well. "Nachos, thanks."

While Wes went up to the bar and chatted with the mulleted bartender, the woman opened the bag of books from Bobby's place and began to spread the texts out on the table. There were three 1960s reprints of John Dee's Enochian writings, an obscure treatise on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the requisite facsimile copy of the frenetic musings of an Alexandrian monk and hermit who had spent thirty years in a walled-in cell subsisting on bread and water - an absolute classic. Faith had always wondered what those shut in clerics did for waste management. Unlike supermax, she highly doubted that early Coptic monasteries had flush toilets or showers.

The Slayer wrinkled her nose reflexively and then took another pull from the whiskey bottle. You couldn't pass along cooties in Heaven - and if one could, Faith figured that Wes didn't have any new germs that she had not encountered before. And as far as her own germs were concerned, Wesley could put on his big-boy pants and deal.

She pulled out the last book, a kind of airhead, feel-good, contemporary story collection called "Angels Among Us," which was likely ninety-nine percent crap with one percent real angel encounters but should at least provide her with a few good laughs. Or, if it was more treacly than funny, she could probably turn it into a drinking game. Faith was open to all possibilities.

As she was working on making a pyramid out of two upturned glasses with the whiskey bottle balanced on top, a shadow blocked out the yellow-orange light from overhead. The Slayer glanced up to see Pamela, her face framed by a cloud of wavy black hair.

"Hey," Faith said with a grin. Her eyes darted over to the bar, where Wesley was peering at Charlie's laptop and likely having some kind of nerd discussion in Klingon. Wesley might pretend that he was too posh for Klingon, but she knew better: no nerd was too posh for Klingon. Satisfied that the Englishman would be occupied for the next several minutes, at any rate, she gestured to his open chair. "Why don't you take a seat?"

The seer dropped into the wooden chair with casual grace. She looked from the other woman across the table to the books laid out before her and then back up again with eyes that knew too much.

"How's death, Pam?" asked Faith with now-forced cheer, tracking the seer's eye movements and beginning to wish that she had just left the damn books in the bag.

A flicker of a smile crossed the other woman's face, then quickly vanished. "You need to be careful," she warned in a soft voice. "This game that you and Wesley are playing carries dangerous consequences for everyone. You should not risk the safety of the Roadhouse."

"I'm not. It's warded pretty damn tight, Pam. Remember when Lucifer decided he wanted to come take a quick chit chat with me when he was wearing a Castiel suit? We painted anti-angel wards all over the inside and outside walls. And I'll ward it again. Better this time."

The dark-haired woman shook her head. "Beware of hubris."

Faith had spent enough time around Wesley and Giles to understand what that particular word meant. "I'm not trying to pick any fights."

Raising an eyebrow, the psychic pressed, "Aren't you?"

The Slayer's smile grew tighter. She decided to show a few of her cards. "I have to know what's out there," she said plainly. "And I have to be able to protect myself. These angels are _not_ benign."

"You're preaching to the choir there," remarked Pamela, tapping the side of her cheek near her eyes, now healed from having been burned away by Castiel. "I learned not to spy on those winged sons of bitches the hard way, remember?"

"I remember," Faith replied with sympathy, then forged head. "But if we want to be safe, we need to be able to protect ourselves."

"If we lay low, there may well be nothing to protect ourselves from," Pamela countered.

"I don't believe that. And I think deep down, you don't believe that either."

Pamela let that one pass, saying only, "Be careful, Faith. _Please_. For everyone's sakes." She rose to her feet.

"Careful's my middle name."

"No," said the older woman, doing her creepy psychic thing again, "you don't have a middle name."

Faith's smile grew even tighter, into a skeletal rictus. "Get out of my head, Pam."

"Hello, ladies. Evening, Pamela. Am I interrupting something?" Wesley had returned, bearing nachos and a properly received pronunciation.

"Not at all. Faith and I were just talking about the next poker tournament. You in?"

"I'm afraid your skill far surpasses my own."

"It's okay," Faith interjected. "He can blow on my deck. Wes here makes quite the little good luck charm."

Pamela chuckled and walked off.

Wesley reassumed his seat, clearing the books to set down a giant tray of nachos, overflowing with cheese, jalapeños, bacon and sour cream and an equally tall stack of napkins.

Faith waited until he was halfway through chewing his first bite to say, "Pamela knows we're up to something."

Swallowing down the sharp angles of tortilla chips with a wince, the man replied, "And are we? More than our usual somethings, I mean?"

"We can't trust the angels," she grumbled, knowing that she was repeating herself and not particularly caring. "And we need to keep ourselves safe. So until we know everything that's going on, then yes, I guess, we're up to more than the usual amount of something."

"Seems appropriate," agreed Wesley. "But can it wait for ten minutes? The nachos are getting cold."

* * *

**March 28th, 2019, Lebanon, Kansas, 8:30 pm**

With a reluctant grunt, Dean Winchester muted the gore-fest on his television and fished through the bedcovers and the Dairy Queen burger wrappers on his bed for his cellphone. He slid his thumb across the screen without looking at the caller ID and barked, "Hello?"

"Dean?" The voice that answered him was uncertain but unmistakeable.

"Buffy?" Why the hell did Buffy Summers want to talk to him? That could not mean anything good.

"Hi," said the blonde, sounding a little more confident. "Hope you don't mind me calling. Lily gave me your number."

He couldn't reasonably justify having angry words with Lily over that. No matter how much he might want to. And now all that he could think about was Lily and Becka's revelations about Buffy's latest relationship. Fan-damn-tastic. "Ah. How, uh, how've you been doing?"

Buffy exhaled into the phone. "Someone told you, didn't they?"

"Huh, what?" Dean backpedaled quickly. "No. Maybe. Uh, yes?"

"Wonderful . . . That's just . . . not all what I'm calling about."

"Didn't think it was," he hastened to assure her. "Glad it's not."

"Seriously?" the Slayer scoffed at him.

"Sorry." Running a hand over his face, the hunter rubbed at his tired eyes. He really was too far gone on B movie horror cheese and cheap burger coma to have a serious conversation. "Uh, what did you want to talk about?"

"It's those Men of Letters. Word has it you Winchesters know a thing or two about them."

"One or two things, yeah."

"Well, Mister Noncommittal, they're really starting to cramp Slayer style. They keep showing up to big shindigs without an invitation and turning manageable situations into complete disasters. They're, uh, in London they've been trying to invade all of Magic Town. According to Spike, anyway."

Dean did some mental gymnastics and interpreted this last to mean that Angel had told Spike to tell Buffy and that Spike had thrown a giant peroxide hissy fit but ultimately done as requested. "How can I help?"

"Giles mentioned that you've been having issues with them, too."

Understatement of the year, but he'd allow it. "Yeah."

"And, uh, Becka said something about your mother working with one of their operatives?" Buffy tried to make the sentence as non-judgmental as possible but was only partially successful.

"You people run your mouths a lot."

"And not just about who I'm dating, apparently."

"Mmm."

"Can you . . ." Buffy hesitated, then plunged ahead, "I know you guys are chronically like snowed in cases, so I hate to ask, but we're not having much luck getting into their offices. They employ some pretty senior league warlocks and sorcerers. Rumor has it they've even used a _mage_."

"Wonder Willow coming up dry?" he guessed.

"Don't tell her I said that."

"Haven't talked to her in years, so that shouldn't be an issue. Why the rush need for surveillance now?"

"They've started killing peaceful loose-skinned demon communities across the UK and now in the US as well. Plus they're getting closer and closer to the Cotswolds."

"What's in the Cotswolds?" asked Dean. "And by that I mean, what the hell _are_ the Cotswolds?"

Buffy explained briefly, "It's a hilly region in south central, south west England. Big on the thatched medieval villages, old churches, limestone houses . . . and that's where the Deeper Well is."

"The _what_?" Sometimes the hunter wished that all Slayer Central interactions came with an accompanying dictionary. It would certainly cut down on his looking stupid, that was for sure.

"It's a hole in the center of the world."

"Sounds about right."

"The Deeper Well goes from the Cotswolds through to about New Zealand. It's the burial ground and prison that was created when your Abrahamic angels and demons sided with The Powers That Be to lock the Old Ones away. Old Ones like Illyria. Only from what she says, her fellow prisoners down there aren't half so friendly."

"Illyria isn't friendly." Weird and powerful and occasionally helpful, but not friendly.

"Putting it mildly much?"

"Ha."

The Slayer admitted begrudgingly, "She's actually hasn't been too bad. She leads the Guardians of the Well, right now. Been keeping everything nice and locked in, which is a relief."

"Not keen on competition?"

"She says something about it not being time. Or at least, she says that to Spike." With wry amusement, Buffy added, "He's her favorite."

"I know that."

The Slayer laughed shortly. "Doesn't everyone. So, anyway . . . do we have a deal, Dean?"

"I'll keep my ears out," said the hunter. "I can't promise you much more than that. But if things get hairy - "

"I'll get you boots on the ground," Buffy promised. "As many as you need."

More than a little surprised, he remarked, "That's generous of you."

"Yeah, well, the way Andrew tells it, you're practically family."

"Come _on_, Buffy," the man groaned. "We were having a good talk here. Why do you gotta bring Andrew into it?"

There were several transgressions that Dean had yet to forgive the younger man for. Posting wild theories on the internet and organizing fan convention panels about his love life headed the top of the list.

"Sorry," apologized the Slayer with a bit of a giggle.

"It's fine. But, uh, can you do one thing for me? In exchange?"

Hurriedly sobering, Buffy asked, "What did you need?"

"Don't tell Sam about this. He, uh, also wants to work with the Men of Letters. Don't think he'd be real on board with the snooping bit."

"My lips are zipped. Thanks, Dean."

"Sure, Buffy. Take care of yourself, now."

"You, too."

The line clicked as the call ended, and Dean dropped his cellphone onto the mattress beside him. He stared at the balled-up hamburger wrappers covering his bed and exhaled heavily. Why did his life always have to get more complicated, not less?

* * *

Nachos finished, Faith began repacking her duffel while Wesley slipped his half of the stash into the seemingly-endless pockets of his coat. She was keeping one John Dee, the psychotic monk, and the _Angels Among Us _nonsense, while he had taken the other two Dee's and the Dead Sea Scrolls one. The Slayer considered this to be a fair distribution. Posh British university-educated Wesley was still better than her at the book thing, anyway.

She was leaned over halfway to the floor, attempting to unstick the zipper on the bag when the light overhead was once again blocked out. Faith turned her head to the side, tossing her hair out of her face in order to make out three separate shadows: Ash, Charlie, and Jo Harvelle. Between the three of them, they managed to block the view of the little corner table from the rest of the Roadhouse.

_Hmm_, thought Faith curiously as she straightened up in her chair. _I wonder what's in the air tonight_. It was perpetually night here, never day, and always a half hour short of closing time. _The dark night of the soul_, she thought to herself grimly and stifled a wry smirk.

"You need a fourth for pool?" she said aloud in a casual tone. The Slayer flipped her whiskey glass right-side up and poured two fingers' worth of dark amber liquid into it.

The three newcomers exchanged glances among themselves, silently determining who would speak.

Jo cleared her throat and gave both Watcher and Slayer her best attempt at a stern look. "We know you're up to something."

"I know I've been working on my own stuff," Charlie rushed in, talking wildly with her hands, "like all that celestial hacking and sh-t, but even I can tell something's up."

"Yeah." Frowning, Ash echoed the women, "Y'all ain't subtle. Not by a long shot."

"And whatever it is," said Jo, "we want in."

"Not just your little hints about breaking into the angel communications, either," added the redhead. "We want in all the way."

"Really?" wondered the Slayer, more than a little incredulously, while Wesley lowered himself back into his chair and poured his own drink.

"Really," said Ash. "Y'all ain't the only ones bored off their asses around here."

"That's fair," Wes muttered into his whiskey glass.

"Also," Jo continued, "we want in on your little fight club."

"What?" Faith was unsure if she had heard correctly. "You know about that?"

Charlie gave her an almost pitying look. "Like Ash said, you and Wesley aren't exactly doing a great job at keeping the International Statute of Secrecy."

"Not really what I said, but close enough."

The computer hacker shrugged. "Anyway, you two aren't the only ones who need to get rid of some frustration." "You're not the only ones who need to burn off some tension."

Faith perked up. This could be fun. "Pull up a seat, guys. We can make room."

Discussion paused while the newcomers scrambled for chairs, they all squished in around the rickety table that had been designed for two but now would have no choice but to fit five. As chair legs screaked across the wooden floor and nearly everyone got hit by a careless elbow, Wesley gave Faith an irritated look while the Slayer sipped at her drink.

"In the future," said Ash once the cacophony of chairs had quieted down, "we could probably just use the backroom."

"Good idea."

"Speaking of the future, now that we're all so close, what are your guys' goals, exactly?" questioned Jo as she pushed a lock of long blonde hair out of her eyes and tucked it behind her ear.

"Resistance," replied the Slayer, her brown eyes gleaming.

For the first time, Wesley interjected, "I'd like to think of it as more of a search for knowledge, establishing justice, and answering key, critical questions about the nature of Heaven."

The Slayer snorted. "He talks a nice game," she jerked a thumb in the Watcher's direction, "and who knows? Maybe some of that is true. But mainly, I want punch those dick angels in the throat."

"You don't like angels? Like at all?" queried Charlie.

"Oh, there's one angel I like," answered Faith, teeth bared in a wolfish grin, "but he's a vampire."

"A vampire with a soul," Wesley answered hastily, because the others had begun giving Faith the concerned looks with which one regarded the clinically insane. "His name is Angel, and he has a soul."

"Fair enough," said Jo. She glanced around to Ash and Charlie, who both nodded. "Either way, we're all in."

"These activities will carry the risk of significant consequences," the former Watcher felt compelled to warn them.

"What he means is that this could be dangerous," Charlie translated.

"Exactly." Faith's grin widened, more sharklike than wolfish now. "And that's where the fun comes in."


	6. After Life, pt 4

**A/N:** Here we are! On schedule! Woot woot! Shout outs to Ninja Violinist and The-Knight2000. Spoilers ahead for SPN 12x15, "Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell."

* * *

"So what I'm telling you, babe, is that you're the most important person to me. Like, the absolute most wonderful, hot girl that I've ever met. And I'm so excited that I get to be the one to take you out to dinner tonight, and that I get to be the one who -"

"Ehem. Faith?"

The Slayer jerked a pair of not-quite-silencing headphones out of her ears and turned away from the sh-tshow that had been Steve's big romantic speech to stare at an intruder in a terribly familiar trench coat.

Faking a smile, she nudged the memory-Steve out of the way with her leg and greeted her visitor. Meanwhile, one hand crept across the couch for the folded oil change brochure that was her ticket out of here. "Castiel. This the for-real you, or is this Lucifer just wearing a Cass-mask to the Easter Parade?"

The angel twisted his features into a bemused frown. "Easter is not until April," he pointed out solemnly. "It is still March. And I," the angel glanced down at the floor in embarrassment, "I am sorry about what happened previously."

Lucifer had not been one for awkwardness. Arrogance, yes, in gilded, obnoxious spades. Not so much the awkward. Faith began to relax, but she needed one more security question answered first.

Fingers closing around the oil change coupon, she pressed, "Who's my favorite angel and why?"

The creature wearing the face of Castiel grimaced. "Your favorite angel is Angelus. He is not an angel. He is a vampire. You find this joke amusing. It is most decidedly not."

"Says you. I think it's hilarious." The Slayer decided to trust him. For now. She smoothed out the oil change brochure, her exit strategy, in her lap. "Why _are_ you here, Castiel?"

Without answering her question, the angel cast his blue eyes about the shabby teenage squatter apartment. "This is an interesting choice of Heavens."

"This isn't my choice of Heaven," Faith said quickly as she tucked the oil change coupon under her leg. "Which you should know, since you've seen it before. Or did Lucifer borrow the eyes as well as the steering wheel?"

"You're angry," Castiel observed.

It didn't take a genius to figure that one out. The Slayer smiled with all of her teeth and approximately one-third of her inner fury. "Constantly."

"At me?" he asked warily.

"Nah." Faith shook her head. "At angels in general. Look, I'm getting a crick in my neck staring up at you, Castiel. If you wanna sit'n'chat, get on with the sitting part."

"Ah." The angel took a careful seat on the far end of the thirdhand couch, unsure if it would support his weight. "I spoke with Joshua. He . . . filled me in on some of your latest exploits." His frown deepened. "Was it truly necessary to assault Alirael?"

"She had it coming. Feather Barbie was trying to kill me."

Castiel's eyebrows scrunched together. "And you had done nothing to provoke her?"

Faith extended both of her middle fingers in his direction, and her smile vanished. "That question frakking sucks ass. And you know it. So cut out the human-blaming and try not be a dick, huh?"

"I -" the angel began.

"And while you're at it, stop dodging my damn questions. What the frak are you doing here, Castiel? I know you didn't come all the way up here just to for sh-ts and giggles."

Awkwardly, Castiel admitted, "I need the help of Heaven. That is, Sam and Dean need the help of Heaven," he backtracked, realizing that would be a better strategy to enlist her sympathy.

"Why?" the Slayer shot back.

The angel's general aura of perplexed-ness only increased. "Most humans . . . after they die, they cease to have strong interests in the land of the living."

The Slayer waved this away. "I'm not that interested in the land of the living. Just want it to remain that way – a land filled with the living. And I'm bored as hell. Come on, Castiel," she wheedled, leaning forwards in her seat. "We don't get the Winchester Gospel podcast station up here. Hell, we don't even get PBS up here. I need some news before I blow my brains out of boredom."

"It is impossible for a human to 'blow their brains out' in Heaven," Castiel said concernedly, crooking his fingers into air quotations.

"Don't I know it," Faith muttered under her breath.

He blinked, unsure if this was rabbit hole worth wandering down. At length, he decided against pursuing it. "If I tell you why I am here enlisting the aid of Heaven, can you promise me to . . . 'lay low' . . . for a time?"

"Ah." Faith sank back against the lumpy couch back. It was all starting to come together now. "That's why you're here. The other dickbags want you to pull me, the proverbial thorn, out of their sides."

His lack of reply was answer enough.

"Okay. I guess I could maybe help out with that. But here's how it's gonna work, Cass. You tell me why you're here – _exactly_ why you're here – and I'll play dead for a bit. In exchange for a couple of other things."

That was quite the fair trade that he had been planning on. "One thing for another, not one in exchange for three."

"Them's my terms, Wings. You can take 'em or leave 'em."

Castiel growing had a feeling that he would likely lose this deal-making session, but he had to try, regardless. "So . . . you would continue down this path? Not even the fear of another encounter like the one you had with Alirael would stop you? I can still see the tissue damage," he added solicitously, indicating the lingering bruising around the Slayer's throat.

She snickered. "Nice try. Thing is, I'm not alive any more, Cass. Which kinda knocks all that existential fear out of you."

The angel exhaled. "Very well. What are your 'one or two' other terms? If they are reasonable," he continued peevishly, "then perhaps I can meet them."

"Three terms," said Faith, ticking them off one by one on her fingers. "One, you tell me everything about why you're here and everything that I want to know about the angels. Two, I want an angel blade. _Today_. Not interested in letting Alirael try her little 'death by suffocation' plan again."

Thus far, Castiel thought he might be able to make those things happen. "And the third?" he asked, dreading the reply.

Faith bit her lip, hesitating. Finally, she blurted out her most shameful desire. "I want a whiteboard. A big one. On wheels. With at least five packs of dry-erase markers. And four erasers. And a _giant_ bottle of cleaning spray. Wait, better make that two bottles of cleaning spray."

The angel tilted his head to the side in concern. "Are you . . . well?" he asked gently.

Rolling her eyes at him, she replied, "I'm dead, and I'm stuck in a series of repeating loops with a bunch of nerds. Just . . . the blade and the whiteboard. And the markers. And the talking. Then I'll lay low. Not for forever. But long enough for you to get whatever you need out of those feathered tight asses."

"You realize that I am one of those feathered tight-asses."

"Of course I do. So . . . Castiel . . ." The Slayer stuck out her hand, nails painted a violent scarlet, "We got a deal?"

Leaning across the empty cushion between them, the angel shook it once, briefly, and then released her as quickly as possible. "Deal." He shifted his weight on the edge of the sofa. "Where would you like to begin?"

"What's going on, man?" she queried, her tone for once inquisitive instead of accusatory. "What do you need from the angels?"

"I am not a human man."

"It's an expression. Which you know. Less of the robot nonsense and more of the talky talky. What's got you so flustered that you're asking these dingbats for help?"

Castiel paused for a moment. He was having difficulty choosing where to start. "Do you know what the Nephilim are?"

Faith thought back to some of her more esoteric research during the last few thousand memory cycles. "Ye-es? I think so? Isn't that what happens when an angel and a human go to pound town?"

The angel did not bother asking the Slayer to take this seriously. He knew from painful experience that this right here _was_ the Slayer taking things seriously. "That is essentially true," he allowed, grimacing at her phrasing. "The singular of the word is Naphil. And a very powerful one will be born in the next few months."

"Judging from your more 'end of the world' than usual voice, I'm guessing you upstairs lot aren't the biggest fans of these Naphils? Sorry, Nephilim?" she corrected herself.

"Nephilim can be incredibly dangerous. They are viewed as abominations. And this particular Naphil . . . its father is an archangel."

Faith chewed on the inside of her cheek while she mulled this over. "But I thought the only archangels left were Mike and Lucy, and aren't they both still jammed down in the Cage downstairs? After that whole thing with Amara and all?"

Castiel looked away as he replied, "This Naphil's father is . . . it's Lucifer. He never . . . Amara never directly put him back in the Cage. After she defeated him, his weakened spirit was left to wander until it found a host."

The Slayer whistled. "Sh-t, Cass. Really?"

"Yes."

"Oh, sh-t." Faith wasn't sure if she should laugh or cry, mock or commiserate. The angel just looked so damn miserable. "And the mother?"

"Human," said Castiel, belatedly adding, "Clearly. But we do not know where she is."

"Did she have sex with Satan like, on purpose?" wondered the Slayer, unable to stop herself.

"No. She believed she was having a consensual affair with Lucifer's host . . . who happened to be the President of the United States . . . of America."

Faith gaped, "What the literal frak, Castiel?"

The angel waited for her to finish processing.

"And you really don't know where she is?" she went on.

"No."

"But you're hoping that the Heavenly Host can help you with this?"

"Yes."

"Do Sam and Dean know?"

Castiel turned back to her, his pale blue eyes wide and pleading. "Faith – "

The Slayer scented blood and went in for the kill. "Do they know what you're up to right now?"

"I do not work at their command," he replied stiffly.

Faith raised an eyebrow. "Okay, so that's a 'no,' then." She sighed. "Dude. Come on. You should tell them. They'll find out eventually, Cass. They always do. You should tell them now before all of this blows up in your face."

"I will tell them once I have results to show. I may – " Castiel glanced away again. "I may have been the one who lost the Naphil's mother."

The angel looked more frazzled than usual, so much so that Faith was prompted to ask, "You all right, Castiel?"

"I am – " Castiel hesitated, then went on to say, "_We_ are all in a perilous position, and I do not yet see our way out."

"But you think the angels can help?"

"I believe they can, and I hope that they will."

"Well." Faith got to her feet and held out her hand for Castiel to shake a second time. "Good luck, dude."

"I am not a 'dude,' but thank you. And you'll – "

"I'll lay low," the Slayer told him. "Can't promise it'll last forever, but I'll try to give you as long as I can."

"Thank you," he repeated himself. "And now for the rest of what I owe you." Castiel reached into the depths of his trench coat and pulled out a gleaming silver sword, with a cylindrical hilt, a triangle-shaped cross-section, and a gloriously razor-sharp tip.

Faith stared at the weapon longingly as the angel spun the blade around and offered it to her, hilt first.

"Take it."

"I didn't mean _your_ sword, Castiel," she protested lamely, her brown eyes nearly green with longing and jealousy.

"I will find another in an armory when I leave here. That will be far easier to explain than bringing one back for you. Please, take it."

He did not have to tell her more than twice. Faith rose to her feet, took the proffered sword, and swung it easily in a few practice slashes. The blade sliced through the air with a satisfying swish, and the hilt felt cool and solid and perfect in her hand. Her spirits soared. She could not _wait_ to try this out on Billy Tompkins.

Castiel allowed her to vanquish the air before continuing, "As for the whiteboard . . ."

The Slayer's glee tamped down a handful of degrees. Swords were the best non-Christmas present ever and all, but a deal was a deal. "Don't let me down, Cass. I gotta have that."

"I will return with one, shortly," he assured her. "I was never employed in this part of Heaven, and so I do not know how to create one for you. If you can be patient – I will convince Joshua that the weak energy expense it requires to create one is a small price to pay for your good behavior."

"Okay." She could accept that explanation and a brief delay – for now. "Stay safe, Twinkle Toes. Sam and Dean need you."

Castiel nodded. There was little utility in protesting the terrible nicknames. "Is there any message that you would like me to pass along?"

Faith had been expecting this, and so she had her answer ready. "No," she said, tracing the edge of the silver angel blade with a lazy finger. Blood bloomed along her fingertip, and she smiled with grim satisfaction. "What's on this side of the Veil should stay on this side of the Veil. They got enough going on, anyway."

"Ah. Enjoy your new, uh, acquisitions."

"Oh, yeah," the Slayer purred as she tossed the blade idly from hand to hand, listening to it sing. "I definitely will."

* * *

While she waited yet again for the coast to clear and for her whiteboard to appear, Faith slogged through her own approximation of a daily routine. She woke up – somewhere – usually in the chill of the cemetery or the warmth of the junkyard and worked out by either staking or decapitating Billy Tompkins in increasingly gymnastic ways or by turning Bobby Singer's Salvage Yard into her own personal obstacle course and using the repetitiveness of Dean's conversation to time herself.

Once she was thoroughly out of breath, she trudged to Steve's apartment to brush her teeth and take a shower, the door locked carefully behind her. Afterwards, she would sit down on Steve's couch and watch the same bad 90's sitcom episode twice while she cleaned and sharpened her weapons, and Steve professed his undying (and quite possibly stolen) love.

Arsenal in tip-top shape, Faith cracked open a couple of Bobby's or Wes's precious books to refresh her memory on the best ways to eliminate strigas and rougarous, poltergeists and Mohra demons. When she was particularly bored, she had even resorted to reading a few of Wesley's rare non-occult books. Thankfully, the Watcher knew her tastes well enough that even if he was feeding her excessive amounts of authors unfamiliar with the flush toilet, at least he chose a selection filled with violence and wars and betrayal and – Faith rolled her eyes to think of this – "derring do."

Scarlet Pimpernel had been not bad, and the Three Musketeers contained a decent number of sword fights. Dracula, however, had been an absolutely puff piece of propaganda, and Frankenstein left her feeling deeply uncomfortable.

Bored of reading, Faith would kit back up in her boots and leather jacket, strap on anywhere between five and twelve different pointy, sharp, or projectile toys, and head out to the Roadhouse, which had now been triple warded inside and outside with blood and holy oil in every protection, hiding, or banishing symbol that she could find.

In the rare times when Wesley was not there to bellyache and throw books at and debate the existential nature of the multiverse with, there were endless games of poker, pool, and darts to be played with Pamela or Ellen, or Faith could pull up a barstool next to Ash and Charlie while they struggled to make inroads on breaking into the angel communications network. As the redhead and the mullet true believer argued shop talk a thousand leagues over Faith's head, the Slayer let the new gulfs and seas of nerd-dom drag her brain down into complacent white noise.

Whenever her former Watcher could drag himself away from his books and his pining over Winfred Burkle to join her, they drank and fought and grumbled and furthered their plan for afterlife domination, and, as Faith put it, punching those dick angels in the throat. And at the end of every long Roadhouse session, when Faith returned back to her own memories, stretching out beside the ghosts of people she had once cared for, angel sword a comforting presence against her hip, her restless mind was momentarily quiet.


	7. Of Hunters and Slayers, pt 1

**A/N:** Shout-outs to The-Knight2000 and Tryjah! Spoilers ahead for SPN 12.22, "Who We Are."

* * *

**May 11, 2019, Highway 281, Kansas-Nebraska Border, 2:00 AM**

Dean's leg was a bloody, fiery, aching mess wrapped up in an old towel that he kept in the back of the Impala. And his lungs weren't much better. Their insides were still coated in dust from first attempting to sledgehammer his way through a concrete wall and then from explosion created from _finally_ getting to use his _awesome _grenade launcher.

He had managed to fake it, just long enough to help Sam strong-arm that bitch Toni Bevell into spell-warded cuffs and into the backseat, and then while the brothers made calls to Garth and other hunters until they were unable to get a hold of Jody.

Now, with Sam lead-footing it behind the wheel and Toni silent and sullen in the backseat, he had a moment to catch his breath. They had already done their best when it came to contacting the hunters that they knew and warning them about those mother-frakking Men of Letters and the fact that they had just declard open season on any and all American hunters that they could locate. Which, to Dean's horror, was probably almost every single one of them.

Thankfully, the hunter had one more trick tucked away up his sleeve, just so long as . . .

"Hey," he barked angrily, turning to glare at their captive (Wo)Man of Letters. "What do y'all know about Vampire Slayers?"

Under better circumstances, when her survival was not dependent on the whims of two homicidal flannel-addicts, Toni would have rolled her eyes. As it was, she only said waspishly, "Vampire Slayers – everyone knows that they are nothing more than jumped up trash with little knowledge and a hair more brute force."

Sam glanced at his brother out of the corner of his eyes. "Dean?" His tone was worried.

Ignoring the muted agony that was his leg, Dean pressed forward, "And what do you know about me and Sam and Slayers?"

If the FBI had known about him and Faith, if Heaven and Hell had always seemed to know about him and Faith, then chances were dangerously high that the stuck-up Men of Letters also knew. And since they had bugged the bunker, then they likely knew about his calls with Buffy. And about the Hellmouth in Cleveland and its current guardians: Lily and an ever-more pregnant Becka. He could not believe it had taken him this long to think of it.

The hunter fumbled in his pocket for his burner phone, already punching in numbers while he waited for Toni to answer.

"You dated one once," Toni replied dismissively. "If that could be called dating. It is well known that you have continued to associate with Slayers following the death of, oh, what was her name several years ago."

"Frak," grunted Dean in a strangled voice while Sam's eyes widened in panic.

"Dean, who're you on with? I'll call -""

Dean cut him off with a harsh wave of his hand as someone picked up on the other end of the line. "Beck?" he demanded sharply.

"Hi," replied a sleepy voice. "I'd ask who's calling, since it's the middle of the night and my caller ID didn't recognize this number, but nobody sounds quite like you, Señor Grumpy Pants." There came a soft male grumble and the Slayer added, "Easy, babe. It's just Dean."

"Becka, listen," he interrupted her. "Do you know where Lily is?"

"Passed out on my couch," came the far less sleepy response. "She had a late cabaret show downtown, and Friday is girls' night. What's the crisis?"

"Those British bastards are exterminating hunters. Slayers, too, probably, if they can get coordinates for 'em."

"More than likely," Toni added nastily from the backseat.

"Sh-t, Dean," groaned Sam.

"You need to get out of there. _Right now._"

"Yep, kinda got that." Another male protest sounded as Becka addressed someone else on her side of the phone, "No complaining, sweetheart. Grab the go-bags and get Lily. I'll meet you in the car." She cleared her throat. "Don't worry about telling the other Slayers, Dean. Soon as I hang up, I'll send out the Twilight Bark. Need anything else before I go?"

"Yeah. You got a secure line for Buffy?"

"Mmhmm. You ready for it now?"

"Yep."

Becka rattled off a quick series of digits, then threw in, "She might still be up. Last I heard, she was staying in San Francisco with Dawn again."

"Thanks. Stay safe, Beck."

"You too, Dean."

The call ended, and the hunter instantly began dialing the new number. While the phone rang out, he reassured his brother that, "The girls are safe. They're leaving Becka's place now."

"Good," exhaled Sam with relief. His giant paws loosened a fraction around the Impala's steering wheel.

Seconds later, a fatigued but very much awake voice croaked in Dean's ear, "Hello?"

"Evening, Buffy. We got a situation here."

Buffy went from tired to attentive in a second. "Dean. You got updates?"

"Not good ones. Those British assholes of letters are knocking off hunters, and I'm pretty sure your people won't be too far behind on their list."

"And of course it couldn't happen at like two in the afternoon."

"Nope. And I need you to call in the cavalry. We're . . ." Dean darted a glance towards his brother, which seemed to strengthen his resolve. He went on, "We're headed for all operations go pretty soon. Like in the next twenty-four hours, I think. So whatever experienced people you've got between the Mississippi and the Rockies that aren't hip-deep in vampires and demons, I'll take."

"You check in with the Cleveland team already?"

"Just Beck and Lil. They're getting out. You were my next call."

"Okay. I'll fire up the phone lines. Thank you for the heads up. You got a rendezvous point?"

"Sam'll text it to you."

Buffy lowered her voice conspiratorially, "He on board with all this now?"

Dean snorted. "Yeah. I think those bastards kinda showed their true colors when they brainwashed our mom and locked us in our bunker without any oxygen."

"Oh."

"Yeah." The hunter purposefully did not look at Sam. "I'll let you go. Thanks, Buffy."

"Good luck, Dean."

One of the items on his panic list resolved, Dean dropped the burner phone into his lap. Only then did he turn towards his younger brother, already dreading the conversation that he knew would ensue.

Awkward confessions to Sam were not exactly his favorite thing. Especially when they had an enemy busy eavesdropping in the backseat.

"So," Sam said, his eyebrows drawing together to create a strange thumbprint-shaped wrinkle in the center of his forehead, "didn't seem like Buffy was super surprised."

"No," admitted Dean with reluctance.

Exhaling in frustration, Sam wondered, "And how long has that been going on?"

"A couple months. Since about the time you said we should work with Mick and Ketch." Dean refused to be embarrassed by this. Not when he had been so dramatically proven right this time.

"Dude." His younger brother shook his head. "Why didn't you tell me sooner? Why didn't you trust me? I mean, clearly you were right about them, and I was wrong, but why didn't you say anything before now?"

"That really what you want to focus on?" Dean fired back with a jerk of his head towards the back seat and Toni, who was leaning as far forward as her seatbelt would allow, listening intently.

"Dean, if we don't trust each other – "

What the hell. If Sam was going to get unnecessarily pissy, Dean could surely return the favor. "What," he taunted, "like you trusted me enough not to keep the fact that you were getting cases from the Brits a secret for weeks?"

"I told you eventually!"

"Yeah, and I'm telling you this now."

The brothers stared at one another, angrily, for a brief moment before Sam turned his eyes back to the road. In a tense voice, he tried to change the subject, "So you talk to Buffy now?"

"Sometimes."

He snarked, "Didn't realize you liked her."

"Who said I didn't like her?" grumbled Dean.

"Well, you used to always seem irritated when she came up."

"That was different. Buffy . . ." The hunter chose his words carefully, feeling Toni's prying eyes on the back of his head. "She really helped out back when Crowley decided to try and make us re-enact _Taken_, remember? She stopped me from doing something I was definitely gonna regret later. Took me a while, but I appreciated that. Eventually."

Sam waited for additional details, but none were forthcoming. "Who do you think she'll send?"

"Dunno," Dean was shutting down. Between his leg and his lungs and his worry for Jody, he had more than enough to deal with. There was no room in his brain for Sam's need for touchy-feely conversation or any speculation. Besides, that was the closest that he had gotten to mentioning Lisa and Ben to his brother in _years_, and he would rather eat his revolver than discuss the subject further. "Don't much care, long as it's not Drew."

His brother knew well enough to accept an olive branch when it was offered. Chuckling faintly, Sam teased, "You ever gonna forgive him?"

"Not unless I have to. He wrote _stories _about us, Sam. And posted them on the _internet_."

"Dean, you know how ridiculous that sounds, right?"

"Less armchair therapy, Sammy. More driving. Capisce?"

* * *

"So that was pleasantly boring," said Jo Harvelle, slipping past the door that led into the backroom of the Roadhouse. She crossed the creaking wood floor to the Slayer, who had her Doc Martens kicked up onto one of the bar's classic rickety tables and her nose buried in Charlie's dog-eared copy of _Quidditch Throughout the Ages._

"Didn't see anyone or anything on patrol," she added, sliding the angel sword across the table to Faith. "Here you go."

"That's the tenth time in a row," remarked Wesley. The former Watcher had taken a stretch break from brushing up on his Enochian and was walking around the room. His progress was slow because he kept stopping to inspect all of the many, many wards that had been charmed, painted, and charred into the roof, walls, and floor.

He paused in front of the bean bag where Charlie was napping upside down to lift her laptop from its precarious perch on her stomach. They did not need yet another electronic device-induced burn wound. It would be the sixth such incident since their little group of sardonic rebel-rousers had expanded from two to five.

Without closing her book, Faith grasped the hilt of her sword and stuck the weapon through one of her belt loops for safe-keeping. "Thanks, Jo,"

"I'm starting to think their numbers really are as depleted as Castiel said," commented the hunter. She pulled one of the spare chairs out from the table and sat.

"Looks that way," agreed Faith, and then she turned another page in her book.

Crouched down in the far corner near one of the more aggressive demon-repelling sigils, Wesley nodded his agreement.

Jo exchanged a side-long glance with Ash, who was half-heartedly cleaning empty beer glasses and watching _Spaceballs_ on his laptop at the same time. Ash gave a feeble shrug and then turned his attention back to the screen, effectively leaving Jo on her own.

The blonde observed her co-captains for several minutes while Faith read and Wesley continued his glacial inspection of the wards. Finally, she ran out of patience.

"Hey, Faith?"

"Hmm?"

"We've been keeping our noses clean for a while now."

Sensing that a question lay ahead, the Slayer glanced up over the top of her book. "Yep?"

"You ready to come out yet?"

Faith closed the thin green volume and laid it on the table. "Soon, I think. I was waiting to see if Castiel would show up again."

"And?" prompted Jo. Behind the bar, Ash paused his movie, and across the room Wesley straightened up.

"And I don't think it's gonna happen. Reliability never exactly been that boy's strong suit." Faith chuckled to herself. "To be fair, though, it's not exactly mine, either."

Wesley allowed himself a small, private smile at this.

As Jo was clearly still dissatisfied, the Slayer got to her feet and, rolling her shoulders back, offered a compromise. "Wanna go train? I wanted to see more of those moves you were showing Ash and Charlie earlier."

The female hunter frowned in confusion. "Isn't Krav Maga like covered in your Slayer curriculum?"

"Probably," said Faith easily. "But you can ask Wes – I was a sh-tty student."

"_Terrible_," the Englishman replied, deadpan. He began moving into the center of the room. "Not to mention violent.

"But you did get better," he added hurriedly, for Jo and Ash were beginning to regard them with the concern which usually meant that either he or Faith had casually overshared too much of the more controversial aspects of the Slayer's past.

"Mmm," the woman in question agreed. "And then I got here. For whatever that's worth."

Pushing her chair into the table, Faith forged ahead before anyone could comment on her last remark. "C'mon, Blondie. Let's go see if you can knock me into the ground."

She nudged the sleeping Charlie with her knee until the redhead opened bleary eyes and attempted to bat her away. "Oy, Red. Time for some girl-on-girl fight action. That's your kinda thing, isn't it?"

"Also mine," Ash piped up, and he closed his computer with a snap.

"Perv," said the Slayer with an empty grin while Jo helped Charlie up off of the beanbag. "Wes, you coming?"

"No, thank you. I need to finish today's Enochian."

"Suit yourself, man. I'll give you a play-by-play later."

Wesley saluted the four younger adults as they walked out. He waited for the faint noise of the outside door closing behind him before he commandeered Faith's book and dropped into the now-empty bean bag chair.

"Kennilworthy Whisp," the Englishman muttered, reading the author's name aloud. "How silly."

Smiling to himself, he settled in for an enjoyable hour of peaceful reading before the others returned. And, if he was particularly lucky, perhaps even a nap.

* * *

**May 11, 2019, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 11:30 a.m.**

"Good talk," said Jody as Sam wrapped up his speech. All around them, the living room was crowded with hunters. While she waited for the others to scurry outside to their vehicles in order to gear up for the long drive to the British Men of Letters headquarters, she commented dryly, "Think you got them all fired up enough to risk their skins."

As she spoke, the stream of jeans and flannel headed out divided around a stranger, a blonde woman in head-to-toe black leathers, with a katana belted to one hip and a hefty Taser strapped to the other. She had just slipped in amongst the crowd. "Plus," the woman added with heavy cynicism, "you know, the threat of annihilation always works a treat."

Jody raised her eyebrows and stepped back, her hand instantly going to her sidearm. She had the semi-automatic revolver up and aimed at the newcomer's heart within seconds. "Who are you?" she demanded.

Her revolver was soon joined by a half-dozen other firearms from the other hunters remaining the room. Dean rose to his feet and staggered forward, ignoring the bloody chunk of skin and tissue missing from his knee.

"Sit," ordered the stranger and the sheriff simultaneously as Dean barked, "Everyone stand down!"

Wincing, the hunter turned to Jody. "Sorry, should have given you a heads up. This is Lily. She's a friend."

"And a Vampire Slayer," the stranger – Lily – finished with a toss of her messy ponytail. "Nice to meet you all," she addressed the room at large.

Then, stepping forward, she extended a hand to Jody. "Hi. Sheriff Mills, is it? I'm Lily Price. Sorry to miss the big powwow. My bike can only go so many miles over the speed limit. You won't give me a ticket for that, will you?"

"Highway's not my jurisdiction," Jody replied automatically, surveying the newcomer with skepticism.

Smiling toothily, Lily turned away from her and back to Dean. "Thanks for the call this morning. Pretty sure my blood is ninety-five percent caffeine by this point, but I'm here. Got another fifteen or so Slayers on the way – the high Buff put the word out, and we groundlings shall obey. Since Becka's too pregnant to make it, B put me in charge."

"Where are the others?" asked Sam, speaking up for the first time.

"Close-ish. I gave them the general area for the meet-up but didn't want to swamp you all. Hello to you, too, Sampson."

The hunter belatedly approached her and gave the Slayer a brief hug. "Sorry, Lil. I'm glad you could make it."

"Always game to kick some ass." Lily stepped back. "What happened to your brother?" She gestured towards the ice pack and blood-stained towel wrapped around Dean's knee.

"Grenade launcher. Concrete tunnel. Had to blow our way out of the bunker. Don't worry," he added, as the Slayer frowned and opened her mouth to speak. "Our friend Alex is a nurse. She took a look at it – doesn't seem like anything's broken or that any major blood vessels were hit. And she gave him a double dose of pain-killers."

Dean nodded in agreement. The meds had begun to sink in nicely. "Yippie ki-yay, mother fu-"

With a fond sigh, Lily walked over to perch on the arm of the older man's chair. "Hate to be a buzzkill, but you can't just Die Hard your way out of everything, you know." She patted him on the elbow.

"I've tried telling him that," muttered Sam.

"I can't?" said Dean.

"No."

"I like her," Jody noted. "How come you haven't introduced us before?" she said teasingly. "Is this that Slayer that Bobby used to mention now and again?"

Lily retracted her hand as if it had been burned and jumped to her feet. "Whoah. No. Wrong read on this situation, Madame Sheriff Lady. That was somebody else. Dean's more like my cranky uncle who needs reminders to eat his vegetables."

"I eat vegetables," said Dean absent-mindedly. He glanced around the corner of the living room into the kitchen, where his resentful, seething, supposedly permanently brainwashed mother was observing everything through ice cold, angry eyes.

"You eat french fries. It's not the same thing." The Slayer followed his gaze and did some rapid mental math. She squeezed his shoulder gently. "So . . . this is Momma Winchester? What happened, Sam?"

"Permanent psychic programming," Toni's crisp received pronunciation answered for him.

Head jerking to the left, Lily stared at the Englishwoman and noted the handcuffs locked about her wrists. "And who's this?"

"_I _am Lady Antonia Bevell."

"That means nothing to me."

"'She works for the Men of Letters," Sam supplied.

"Right. Not a fan." In a kinder voice, the Slayer asked Dean, "You okay?"

Dean took his eyes away from his mother long enough to grumble, "Mind your own business, kid."

Lily was not perturbed in the slightest. "Your business is my business. To be specific, in this instance as Winchester business has turned into Slayer business, and since Becka and me are the Slayers assigned to handle any non-Buffy-level Winchester-Slayer business, that means that your problems are my problems."

Sam raised an eyebrow at that convoluted run-on sentence. "That caffeine kicking in?"

"Yeah, definitely. Can I use your bathroom, Sheriff Mills? I've been on that bike since like two a.m., and my bladder is like five minutes away from exploding."

"Of course." Jody gestured down the hallway, and Lily followed her off towards the restroom.

Toni waited for them to disappear from view before continuing snidely, "I've remembered the name now. Of that Slayer who used to be so _closely_ associated with you Winchesters. Faith, wasn't it?."

Dean lurched to his feet a second time. "Sam," he said warningly.

The younger Winchester took a menacing step in Toni's direction. "Shut up," he growled. "Or we will make you shut up."

Although she scowled angrily up at him, the Englishwoman said nothing further.

"There." Sam turned to appease his older brother. "That what you wanted, Dean?"

"Yeah." Dean sank back into his chair. "That should do it for now."

* * *

As the hustle and bustle of loading out continued, Sam got sucked into directing his troops, assigning carpool arrangements in the convoy, and loading up the back of Jody's truck with all of the many explosive playthings that Dean had left in the Chevy. Grim-faced, Jody escorted the handcuffed Mary and Toni outside, where she securely strapped them into opposite sides of the Impala's backseat.

Ultimately, it was left to Lily to help Dean limp his way out of Jody's easy chair and into his car.

"We could do this the easy way, you know," she told him, wrapping an arm around the hunter's back and supporting him as he gingerly pushed off the chair with one hand and pulled against her shoulder with the other.

"And what's that?" asked Dean, very fatigued and more than a little high from pain medication. In an ideal world, he would have gone immediately to bed and slept for three days. But the clock was ticking steadily onwards, and he only had a limited amount of time to save his mother.

"I could carry you out there. I'm definitely strong enough."

"I know." He took one careful step forward and then another. "Nice outfit."

"Thanks."

"Didn't remember you driving a motorcycle."

Since he would find out as soon as he saw the motorcycle in question, Lily figured she might as well tell him now. "It's Faith's bike."

"Ah." He leaned more of his weight on the Slayer. She had been right; she could take it. For a moment, Dean dropped his guard. "I wish she was here," he said softly, almost plaintively.

"I know." The hand pressed against his ribs moved in a comforting half-circle. "So do I. She'd blast the hell out of 'em all."

"And then some."

They moved slowly closer to the door. If he had not been so tired, Dean would have been mortified. Still, he could write this off as saving his strength. Once they got to the car, it would be just him with his mother and Toni. He certainly couldn't lean on anyone then. But for now . . .

Lily seemed to be following the same train of thought. She said in a quiet voice, "You sure you're okay to go back to Kansas on your own with Mary and that stuck-up chick? I can peel off, send everyone else on the takedown mission, make sure you've got somebody covering your six."

"It's okay. They need all the firepower they can get. And I need you to watch Sam's back, okay?" His grip tightened on her shoulder. "Can you do that for me, Lil?"

"This isn't some intentionally dangerous self-sacrificing behavior, is it?" the Slayer wondered, suspicious.

"No."

"Because you're worth protecting, too, you know."

"I can handle this," he insisted, swinging his injured leg forward and trying not to grimace. "My mom and Toni. They're already cuffed and in the car. It'll be fine."

"Dean, you can't even really walk."

"Aren't you supposed to say nice things to wounded people?"

With a shake of her head, the blonde replied, "I'm only required to be nice at auditions. The rest of the time, I can say whatever I want."

He laughed, even though it made his chest ache. "Fair enough. But trust me – I can do this. I just need you to watch out for Sam for me."

"Okay. But you should remember that I'm not technically supposed to kill human people. How do you feel about very violent knee-capping instead?"

"Do what you gotta do. Just keep him safe."

* * *

For her first venture back into the angel-centric regions of Heaven, Faith decided to accompany Jo on a mission to visit Bobby Singer. Ostensibly, the Slayer claimed the need to stretch her legs as the reason for getting back in the swing of things.

In practice, she had read through all of Charlie's Harry Potter-adjacent books and had completely given up on Castiel's returning. He had swung by once after his initial visit, to deliver her whiteboard and ten packages of dry erase markers, but there had been no updates on the search for the spawn of Satan or on the angels' specific numbers since.

The Slayer chose Jo as her companion because after Wes, the blonde hunter was the most combat-trained of the group. These days, she was trying to give Wesley a little more space, even if doing so meant that Faith had to spend the day with her guard up. That was just fine with the Slayer, who more or less kept her guard perpetually up. It was a good thing.

Using the silver keys that Wesley had liberated from Alirael, they navigated along a set of short-cuts that Jo and Ash had discovered until they reached the S's.

Bobby opened the door in a slightly less curmudgeonly fashion than usual. He almost expressed an emotion other than grumpy when he saw Jo, pulling her into a hug and asking about her parents. Faith received a brief nod and instructions to "help yourself with the books. You always do."

Leaving the two hunters to catch up, the brunette advanced to the many crowded bookshelves lining the walls of Bobby's sitting room. She scanned the titles printed and embossed along their spines. Occasionally, she lifted a volume down and flipped through the table of contents.

Faith was not expecting much success here. She had already gone through Bobby's library with a fine-tooth comb – and then sent Wesley along with explicit instructions and an even finer-toothed comb. If Tall, Educated and Nerdy thought they had exhausted Bobby Singer's supply of angel- and Heaven-related information, then they probably had. Still, it never hurt to look.

After several minutes of chit chat, the other two finally disengaged from one another long enough to include the Slayer in their conversation.

"Kind of you to stop by and see me," commented Bobby, opening the cooler of beer beside his easy chair and handing each of the women a can of Bud Light.

Jo frowned at hers. "Next time, I'm bringing you some of the good stuff from the Roadhouse," she promised him.

"Sweetheart, I don't think y'all stock any good stuff at that place." Chuckling, he turned to Faith. "You hear anything from the boys or Cass lately?" asked the grizzly hunter. He was one of the few outside the backroom of the Roadhouse who knew about the existence of Castiel's little visit. But not the entirety of its substance. Faith had shared the full details of Cass's visit with no one other than Wesley.

Preoccupied with finishing half of her Bud Light in one go, the Slayer waited until she had swallowed and wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her leather jacket before replying. "Not a peep."

"No news is good news, right?" Bobby's light brown eyes grew smaller and harder as he squinted at her.

"Something like that," Faith agreed. She resisted the urge to cross her fingers.

Half an hour later, once they were back in the bright white hallways, a new stash of possibly relevant books and some violent detective novels stashed in the Slayer's army green duffle bag, Jo cleared her throat and said, "Why did you agree with Bobby back there? No news isn't always good news. Especially when it's the Winchesters we're talking about."

"Bobby's happy," the Slayer explained simply. "He's tucked up nice and safe and sound with endless beer and Tori Spelling's latest trashy memoir and all the pedicure supplies a man could ever want. I ain't ruining that for him."

"You're a good person. That takes restraint."

Faith chuckled. "I don't know if I'd go that far. I just think everyone who made it up here deserves to be happy. It's supposed to be perfect, you know." She waved a hand vaguely at the walls surrounding them. "This whole Heaven schtick."

"But it isn't," Jo pointed out, raising a well-groomed eyebrow.

"Nope. And that's where our part comes in. But I draw the line at destroying the fantasy for people."

"Because they deserve to experience paradise even if it doesn't work for us?"

Snapping her fingers, the Slayer made a pair of very lame finger guns. "Exactly."

The blonde smiled. "And just to think – the Roadhouse was getting boring before you and Wesley showed up."

Faith gave a laugh with more effort than she felt. "That's the thing about me an' Wes. We're a lotta things – " _Not all good_, she thought darkly, "but boring ain't one of 'em."

* * *

**May 12, 2019, 12:15 a.m., somewhere in Southeastern Ohio**

Flames screeched upwards to a black sky while a herd of trucks and rusted SUVs raced away from the burning British Men of Letters compound. At the rear of the convoy, three people were squished in the front seat of Jody Mills' truck. Each of the vehicle's passengers were covered in scrapes and scratches, and the Slayer riding the hump had someone else's blood splashed from her boots to her waist, but they had emerged from the frantic gunfight mostly unscathed. A statement which could _not _have been made about their vanquished opponents.

"I always did like a good bonfire," the Slayer commented thoughtfully, twisting in her seat to glance over her shoulder. "Although this one's probably too toxic for marshmallows. And it's nice to see that you boys haven't forgotten how to do things in style." She gave Sam a friendly dig in the ribs with her elbow.

"Forget the boys. That explosion was _my _idea," Jody reminded her.

Lily grinned. "You're right. Girl power all the way." Turning fully back to the front, she shifted the leg that was on the driver's side of the gear shift over to the passenger's side.

"Why couldn't you have taken another car?" grumbled Sam when his already-insufficient leg room was reduced even further. Adrenaline was racing through his veins, and he still could not quite believe that they had finally solved their Men of Letters problem. But he had not noticed Ketch among the injured or the dead, and that concerned him. "There were like three car loads of your people."

"Because I left my motorcycle back in Sioux Falls," she explained patiently. Noticing his grimacing expression, she nudged his knee with hers. "Hey, cheer up, dude. That was a resounding success. Minimal casualities and maximum don't frak with us ass-kicking on our side, total destruction of U.S. operations on theirs."

Sam's grimace deepened. "Not total destruction," he pointed out. "We didn't see Ketch."

"We'll find him," Lily tried to reassure him.

"He'll definitely be running short on resources soon," Jody commented. "Me, I'm a little concerned about those talking heads up on the screen. That must have been, what, their London headquarters?"

"Yeah." Sam pursed his lips. "And who knows what they can do?"

Wriggling about in her seat, Lily fished a cell phone out from somewhere in her road leathers. "You can let me worry about London." She typed in a series of numbers and then clicked the speaker button.

Seconds later, a Cockney voice answered. "Hey, luv. You make it out of the big to-do all in one piece?"

"All pieces here and accounted for, Spike," the Slayer replied cheerily. "Plus a couple of friends. I got Sam Winchester here with me, and his fellow hunter, the distinguished Sheriff Jody Mills."

"Hi, Spike," Sam said on cue. He could feel a headache coming on.

"Samuel. Sheriff." The voice then returned to addressing Lily. "What do you need, pet? I'm not your usual post-action call."

"I was hoping you and Angel and Illyria could do me a solid. You know that Men of Letters conclave out near Hampstead Heath?"

"Yes?"

"Can you blow it all to holy hell?"

"Done," said Spike in tones of wicked glee. "Blue an' I'll send you a video."

"Thank you."

"I thought Slayers were supposed to be female?" Jody hazarded once Lily had ended the call and commenced a furious flurry of text messages. The sheriff was not sure that she had ever seen thumbs move that quickly across a touch screen before.

The blonde beamed. This was one of her favorite parts. "Oh, Spike's not a Slayer," she answered with excessive innocence. "He's a vampire." She intentionally left out the important bit about the soul-factor. "So's Angel. Not Illyria, though."

"And what is she?" asked the sheriff weakly.

"Ancient demon goddess sharing the body of a genius-level scientist," Lily chirped back.

Jody took fifteen miles of highway to process this. At length, she closed her mouth and said, "Sam . . ."

"Yeah, Jody?"

"I realize this might be a stupid question for me to be asking, but don't you and Dean have any normal friends?"

Sam glanced down to his left, where the Slayer was slumped against his shoulder. Having finished her text message onslaught, she had promptly crashed after twenty-two hours of driving, caffeine, and hamstringing Men of Letters operatives.

"Nah," he replied, keeping his voice down. "Do you?"

"I _used_ to," the older woman said emphatically. "But not anymore, I guess. Don't think you can call anyone in the sheriff's department normal. _Definitely_ not the desk sergeant."

"Thank you, Jody." Taking his non sequitur and running with it, Sam continued, "For what you did back there. For taking out Hess, for having my back . . . everything, really."

"How sweet." Jody smiled, appreciating the sentiment. "Right back at you, kiddo. But speaking of people at your back . . ." Her voice trailed away as she gestured with her chin in the direction of the unconscious Slayer. The sleeping woman had one hand wrapped around her lap seat belt and the other clutching Sam's sleeve.

"Yeah?"

"Didn't really let you out of her sight, did she?"

"No, she didn't." Sam did not bother to disentangle himself. As long as Lily refrained from drooling on him, it would be fine. "Anyway, I'm pretty sure Dean asked her to. Lil's not usually _this_ clingy."

"And you're not upset about that?" wondered the sheriff. "I mean, I'm glad you're not upset. Just don't want you to get back to Lebanon and get into it with your brother."

Sam smiled in the darkness. "I dunno what we'd do without you, Jody. But no, I'm not upset. Honestly, at first I was kinda tempted to ask Lily to hang back in South Dakota and look out for Dean. Can't be too mad at him for doing something I wanted to do myself."

"Well, that's good," said Jody, grateful for this evidence of personal growth. "How . . . I didn't really want to ask this question in front of Dean, since I know Slayers can be a touchy subject around him, but how exactly do you know this particular one?"

The hunter exhaled. "That's a long story."

"We got a long drive," she countered. "And at least six hours before we have to stop for gas, so you may as well start talking."


	8. Of Hunter and Slayer, pt 2

Hi all! My apologies for the delay. It's a busy time to be a resident physician right now. Updates will probably be very scattered for the next month or two. But here's a little bit of Faith and Dean hanging in there to help us all hang in there.

* * *

**June 1, 2019, Death's Reading Room, Grand Junction, Colorado, **

"You have work to do," Billie said severely. The newly appointed Death folded her arms across her chest, clearly not interested in any rejoinder he might make. "That's all you need to know."

Dean opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off.

"And trust me," she continued with a frown, glancing around the rows and rows of shelves laden with thin black folios, "having my eyes opened to the necessity of any humans, especially Winchesters, is _not_ a thrill. So . . . you wanna die – "

"I – " the hunter started and was again interrupted.

"You wanna die, Dean Winchester," Billie sneered, "but I say . . . keep living."

"Hmm." He needed to get back, back to Sam and the Meadow's house. Needed to make sure that Billie had kept her bargain and that Evan and Shawn and all of the other ittle kids had finally been set at peace. But first –

"I need to know," he demanded. "My mom – "

"I'm not answering any more questions," the new Death informed him flatly. "But here . . . since you were in such a big rush to lay down and die, since you didn't even try to bargain to go back for yourself, just freedom for the other ghosts, I'm gonna do you a favor. Call it a little taste of what you might have gotten if any of these books said you died today."

"Huh?" Dean spluttered.

"Since I'm feeling extra nice," Billie continued in a tone that was not very nice at all, "I'll give you thirty whole minutes. How's that? You can be dead for half an hour, and baby brother'll be right there waiting for you when you wake up." She smiled nastily. "I fancy he won't enjoy the time quite as much as you will, but there you go."

"What?" the hunter gabbled for a second time.

"Shut up before I change my mind," said Billie, and she snapped her fingers.

The reading room around Dean blurred, and he found himself in a musty apartment that reeked of scorched spaghetti sauce. Cheesy old people music blared from a speaker in an adjacent room, accompanied by a woman's off-key singing voice. The music jarred his ears, but Dean did not allow himself to be distracted from the truly unexpected sight standing with its back to him: Faith Lehane in front of a _giant_ dry erase board that brushed the ceiling, a blue marker in hand, wearing a set of footed children's pajamas covered in not-so-tiny Peter Rabbits.

His stomach plummeted. So this was what Billie had meant by a taste of what he might have gotten. Half an hour . . . in Heaven . . . with Faith Lehane, while his brother was stuck with a corpse and no idea of what had happened.

Dean wondered why Billie had decided to be so lenient. Seven minutes would have been more appropriate. He figured this was likely her way of punishing Sam – and sticking Dean with guilt that would last much longer than half an hour. Damn her. And he still didn't know anything about how his mother was holding up on the other side of the rift.

Distracted by a whole herd of worries, he watched the Slayer scribble frantically across the board for several iterations of some cyclical flowsheet before he finally coughed to make his presence known. "Nice digs."

The Slayer whirled, and suddenly the razor-sharp tip of an angel sword was being very pointedly shoved into the soft hollow at the base of Dean's throat.

This was not quite the welcome that he had expected. "Faith?" he asked gently, taking one careful teensy tiny step backwards.

"You again." The woman's eyes were narrowed and dark, somewhere between irritated and homicidal.

Easing back another step, he said, "Mind dropping the sword?"

The angel blade followed him. If she had not been quite so close to giving Dean an unnecessary shave, he would have been very impressed with how menacing Faith was making bunny-footed pajamas.

"Prove that you are who you look like and not a winged dick in Winchester clothing."

Dean exhaled. The whole 'identify yourself' thing was getting old, especially when all he wanted to do was collapse on that run-down couch on the other side of the Slayer's whiteboard and sleep. Or wake up and check on Sam. Either alternative would be acceptable at this point.

On the other hand, when ladies held sharp weapons to your neck, it was best to do as they asked. "You adopted a dog after Katrina. Vamps got it. Angelus thought it was funny enough to make a joke about, when he and Dru were palling around with that Archaeus dude."

"Okay. So it is you." Faith lowered the weapon, but still did not seem particularly excited to see him. "What brings you to my neck of the woods?"

Dean explained briefly the situation with the Meadows house, Sam, and Billie. When he finished, the dead Slayer swore, more out of habit than passion.

"Well, I'll be damned," said Faith. "Your death wish really is worse than mine." She turned back to her white board and capped the blue marker. "So this is only temporary," she surmised tersely, each word staccato, tense.

The hunter edged his way forward. He was having a little trouble putting everything together. "You seem . . . angry. Are you . . . do you not want me here?"

Faith tossed her head without looking at him. "No, that's not it."

He took in the cramped writing covering the entirety of the gigantic board. The board was divided into sections by meandering lines in multiple colors. Some sections seemed to be lists of names, the vast majority of which were crossed out. Others held maps or diagrams. One section held only a poorly drawn lightbulb and a giant question mark.

Moving across the room, Dean placed a hand on the Slayer's shoulder. "Hey," he said quietly, pushing thoughts of Sam aside for the moment. Something was _off_ about the Slayer. And just like everything else in the universe, it seemed to be up to him to fix it. Dean supposed he owed it to the Slayer to at least try. "What's this?"

"Heaven's falling apart." Faith finally looked at him, _truly_ looked at him, and sighed. "And apparently that's not the only thing. You don't look so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, either, Kansas. Thirty minutes, you said?"

"Dying'll do that to you," he replied quickly, because he could see the concerned frown forming on the Slayer's face. "More like twenty-five, now."

Faith ducked to the side so that his hand fell from her shoulder and peered intently into his face. "Maybe," she said with another heavy exhale, "but that isn't all it is, is it?"

The Slayer continued staring up at him for a long moment, and Dean let her. He was busy running through his own visual checklist. She looked stressed and tired and pissed off, but at least there was no significant weight loss or gaping wounds. No gaping wounds that he could see, at any rate. And if there were dark half-circles under her eyes that he had not expected to find, he was relieved that she was not drowning in Fyarrl snot or burning up in Ifrit fire.

At length, Faith appeared to come to a decision. "All right, cowboy. I guess I can take a break. Not like I was getting anywhere anyway."

She shoved the whiteboard aside with one hand. With the other, she grabbed the hunter's wrist and tugged him along, then shoved him down onto the couch and settled herself at the other end, resting her feet on a faded Snow White pillow that sat atop the broken-down coffee table.

"You say there's not much time."

"No."

"Well, then, you'd better get to talking. What's got you looking more miserable than some girl who just got ditched by her prom date? And why does this Billie think you're all hot to trot for the death brigade?"

"I could ask you some of the same things," Dean countered, not sure for the moment if he actually wanted to tell her anything. Faith was – well, he had _thought_ she was – safe here, safe in Heaven with her best memories and access to the Roadhouse and some of her friends. He had thought she was happy. But clearly, that was not the case.

Careful not to sound too defensive, he dodged her questions. "What's Heaven like, Faith? Really?"

"It's Heaven," grumbled the Slayer, glancing away again. "There's nothing to do but stalk the angels or, when that doesn't pan out, to get in touch with your emotions. Not that there's much point to it, and not like emotions really matter anymore. But so it goes."

"Vonnegut." Dean named what he thought was the reference.

"Gezunheidt."

The hunter had to crack a smile at that. When he looked up, the Slayer was giving him a thousand-yard, dead-eyed stare. "What?"

"Talk, Winchester. What's going on with you?"

Dean opened his mouth to say something nonsensical. What came out instead was, "Castiel's dead."

Faith blinked several times in quick succession as she processed. "I'm sorry." To her credit, it sounded mostly sympathetic. She paused, then added, "Did this have anything to do with Lucifer's kid?"

Gaping, the hunter asked, "You knew about that?"

She shrugged. "Castiel paid me a visit not too long back. Don't ask me when. I've got no frakking idea about time here. But it was before some big ol' demon ganked Joshua. Cass mentioned something about Lucifer getting his rocks off with a human chick, making a – what's the word again?"

"Naphil." Dean ought to be surprised that Castiel had visited Faith and not said anything about it, but he was simply too tired to feel surprise about anything right now.

"Yeah, that thing. So what happened to Castiel?"

"We took out Lucifer, got him trapped in some alternate dimension that opened up when the kid was being born. But Castiel died doing it. So did Crowley. And Lucifer . . . he trapped my mom in that other dimension with him," he rattled off the events as quickly as he could. If he went fast, like ripping off a bandaid, perhaps it wouldn't hurt so bad.

"Sh-t, Dean," exhaled Faith. She scooted a few inches closer along the lumpy couch cushions. The Slayer extended her hand as if to touch his arm, then quickly pulled it back again. "How long ago was that?"

"A month, maybe. We're," Dean swallowed thickly, "Sam an' me, we're doin' everything we can think of to figure out a way to get to her, but . . . so far no luck. I was . . . I was kinda hoping that Billie could tell me something about her, but she sent me here instead."

"I'm sorry." This time, she seemed completely sincere.

The hunter turned his head away so that she could not see the tears burning at the backs of his eyes. "Yeah. I just – it's just that – look, every time I think things are gonna be okay, we lose somebody else."

"What can I do to help?"

Dean made a somewhat hysterical noise. "Nothing you can do. You're _dead_, Faith," he pointed out, not unkindly. "For what it's worth, I'm already talking to your people – Buffy, Angel, even Willow. They said they'll try and help. But I . . . I don't got a whole lotta hope left."

Half of him wanted the Slayer to close the space between them and touch him. The other half was relieved when she did not.

Maintaining her distance, Faith gnawed on her lip as she considered this. "And what about the spawn of Satan?"

"His name's Jack. He's been staying at the bunker with Sam and me. Got too much power and no idea how to control it. Not totally convinced yet that he isn't gonna murder us all in our sleep or something. But you know Sam. He likes lost causes."

"So now you've got a kid," the Slayer summarized wryly.

"I do _not_ have a kid," Dean insisted.

"Okay. You and Sam have a kid. There, that better?"

"No."

Faith smiled for the first time, smug and full of her own cleverness. G-d, Dean had missed that smile. "I bet he's imprinted on you, like one of those baby ducklings."

"Don't make a joke out of it," he said shortly. "Kid's a bomb waiting to go off."

Smile fading, she commented, "Weren't we all, once upon a time?"

Dean relented. "Sam still is. Every damn time he eats a burrito."

The smile returned, smaller than before, but present all the same. "Montezuma's revenge."

He could think of one piece of good news to make that smile wider. "There's something else I should tell you."

"I'm listening."

"Becka's pregnant."

Faith smacked him in the shoulder, hard enough to leave a bruise. "Shut the frak up!" She moved closer on the couch. "Is it a boy or girl?" she inquired excitedly. "And how pregnant is she?"

"Super pregnant. Über-pregnant, if you ask Lily. I think the count's at thirty-something weeks, but Beck won't say the gender. She did ask me and Sam to be the godfathers though." It was one of the few things in recent weeks that Dean was actually proud of.

The Slayer nodded. "Who's godmother?"

"Lily. Clearly."

"Poor fetus. It's gonna hear a thousand show tunes before its first birthday."

"At least."

They smirked at one another, enjoying the joke at Lily's expense, and Dean felt relieved. Here she was, finally. The real Slayer, instead of the distracted, disinterested version that had threatened him with the angel blade. Not that he disliked Slayers with sharp and lethal things. He just preferred it when the lethal things were pointed at other people.

"It doesn't get easier," he said after a moment of watching her smile.

Cocking her head to one side, Faith asked, "What doesn't?"

"Living without you."

The woman rocked back in her seat, crossing one knee over the other and looping her interlocked fingers around the top one. She did not say anything. She merely met his gaze with a deepening frown.

"I keep thinking that one day it will," Dean explained hurriedly. "But it doesn't. And I . . . I can't save anybody. Not Cass, not Mom, not those poor kids who got stuck in that damned house . . . nobody." His eyes burned as he went on, "I mean, I couldn't save you."

"I wasn't yours to save," the Slayer corrected him, her tone harsh. "_My_ life, _my_ death, _my_ choices, remember?"

He glanced at her. Less than two feet of bumpy couch separated them, and yet it felt like she was oceans away. "I know," he said, helpless. "But that doesn't make it any damn easier."

"Hmm."

Dean looked away and addressed the threadbare carpet. "I'm so tired," he admitted. "I just . . . frak it, Faith, maybe Billie was right. Maybe I can't believe anymore. Maybe I'm not the guy who saves the world, the guy who thinks that no matter what, there's always a way we can win, if we work hard enough. Maybe . . ." he took a deep breath, "maybe she was right about the other part, too. Maybe I do want to die."

The couch creaked as Faith uncrossed her legs and turned slightly towards him. "Doesn't sound like she's giving you death as an option," she said in a neutral voice.

"No."

"And Death herself seems to think you and Sam are pretty damn important. I guess that's something to be proud of?"

"I'm – " Dean blinked, hard. "Maybe I'm tired of being important," he confessed, and he lifted his eyes from the carpet. "Maybe I just want to be here with you."

The Slayer's gaze was distant as she replied, "You need to get laid, man."

Dean almost choked. "That's it? That's your big pep talk? Sex fixes everything?"

"Sometimes."

"I get laid," he said defensively. "I get laid all the time."

"Really?" Faith raised an eyebrow. "When was the last time that happened? When's the last time you let some real live, living girl or guy or what-have-you blow your mind or whatever?"

"I don't exactly keep track of it in my journal. I'm not a teenager. Or Samantha."

"You sure about that?" the Slayer fired back sarcastically.

"Hey, watch it. I'm not the one in the bunny PJ's."

"I frakking hate these." She scowled down at the cartoon rabbits in their long blue shirts.

"They're actually kind of cute."

The Slayer rolled her eyes dramatically. "_Of course_ you'd think that. You're _massively _backed up. Your brain's probably turned to mush from lack of stimulation." She leaned forward to add, "And I'm sure that's not the only thing."

Dean grinned in spite of himself. "Look, there's no way that I've got the mushy brain here. Your whiteboard looks pretty damn mad scientist, Faith. Maybe you're the one who needs to get laid."

Grimacing, she replied, "Trust me; I've thought about it. There are zero options up here, bud. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada."

"We could both get laid," he suggested, more for old times' sake than anything.

That startled a real laugh out of her. "Not enough time for that, cowboy."

"Mmm," said Dean. Something fragile fluttered inside his ribs. It felt terrifyingly close to happiness. "There never is, is there?"

And suddenly, he could not even pretend to be irritated with her anymore, and the empty space on the couch between them were more than Dean could bear. Giving in to his exhaustion, he broke the unspoken 'no non-violent touching' taboo and flopped sideways. His head landed in the unsuspecting Slayer's lap and collided rather uncomfortably with her leg. Heaven had not provided the woman with any extra cushioning.

"What the hell, Winchester?" Faith grumbled, as the hunter rolled onto his back and latched onto her right hand, which was closest to him, grasping it in one of his and tugging it down to his chest. "I did not say yes to snuggle time." Despite her protestations, she did not push him away.

"Come on, Boston. We only got ten minutes left," he wheedled.

With an exasperated sigh, the Slayer pointed out, "I could strangle you. Easily,"

"But you won't."

"No." Faith ran her free hand lightly through his hair, pressing it down and then watching it spring back into place. "There. You happy?"

Dean wished he could go back to that reading room and punch Billie in the face. This had not been a favor out of the goodness of her heart. This was nothing short of cruelty. To make matters worse, his stupid mouth refused to quit running itself. "I wish I could see you more often."

With something like a rueful smile, the Slayer squeezed his hand once. "Yeah." She continued, "I see you like every day, but it's like some weird-ass memory version of you, so I don't think that really counts."

This was the closest they had gotten to the 'S'-word so far. "So you're saying – "

"That you're the person I knew the longest without trying to kill," Faith shut that particular line of thought down. "Which is not quite as glamorous as it sounds. 'Cuz, to be honest, I've probably tried to murder most of my friends. Bad habits die hard and all."

"Hmm." Dean let it go. Instead, he followed a different thought, one that had been bothering him for the last twenty-plus minutes. "I'm not blind, Faith. Heaven's doing worse than falling apart, isn't it?"

"Maybe," the Slayer hedged. "But you've got enough going on with finding your mom and raising Damian."

"Jack," he corrected her.

Faith waved an airy hand and nearly whacked him in the nose. "Whatever. Point it, you don't need to worry about me. I've got this under control. I'm – "

"If you say 'five by five,' I will bite that hand," Dean warned. "Please don't lie to me."

This time, she did push him off of her lap and onto the floor.

"Hey," he grumbled, getting to his feet. "Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought being honest was our thing. That we told each other the truth and didn't keep secrets or hold back the bad sh-t." He gave her whiteboard a significant look, then asked, "Are you planning on going to war with Heaven?"

Faith scrambled up from the couch. "Not unless they make me," she answered in a quiet, bleak voice.

Her serious admission terrified him. "What the frak is going on up here?" he hissed, trying not to panic.

"Angels being dicks," the Slayer said quickly and dismissively. "You know. The usual. Don't worry about it."

"Kinda late for the 'don't worry' train there, Boston."

"No." She gave an emphatic shake of her head. "I shouldn't have said anything. Because there's nothing you can do about this, just like there's nothing I can do about any of your Damian slash alternate universe stuff. And especially since none of this is your fault, and everyone keeps putting the weight of the whole damn world on your shoulders – including you – and I don't want you to carry this, too. 'Cuz it's not yours to carry, Dean," she finished hotly. "It's _mine._"

"Okay," he said, accepting defeat. "It's yours. But you'd warn me, if you thought there was something I oughtta know about?"

"Sure. Here's your warning, Dean. Heaven's almost out of angels, and the ones left are not exactly paragons of stability. Wes and me, we think that if they lose too many more angels, this whole place might fall out of the sky and go kablooey. But like I said, we got it handled. Wesley makes with the books, and I'm trying to keep track of angel numbers. So we can know when we need to be prepared for the next Big Bang."

Dean sank onto the couch. He could feel a thunderclap headache coming on. "So," he said weakly, "I should have just let you get away with five by five, huh?"

She rested one knee on the couch cushion next to him. "See? This is why I didn't want to tell you."

"It's fine," he lied. "It's fine. I just – I had hoped you were okay up here. I guess nothing's ever quite what it's cracked up to be, huh?" He looked up at her.

"I don't think so, no." Sitting down, Faith reached out and took his hand. She interwove her fingers with his. "Except sometimes cheese. And beer. And milkshakes."

"And good music," Dean added, gripping her hand more tightly. "Not this Sinatra crap." The man closed his eyes as Faith leaned her head against his shoulder. "And cars."

"And this," the Slayer said in a soft voice. Her thumb traced over the back of his knuckles.

"Yeah." He really frakking wanted to gut Billie now. Bitch. She had known exactly what was going to happen when she gave him this twisted little 'favor'. The next time he saw her, he would probably . . . say thank you? As frakked up as this was, he would still rather be here holding hands with Slayer than anywhere else. "And this. Every time."


	9. Winter of Our Discontent, pt 1

**A/N:** Sorry for the delay between updates. The world is crazy right now. But I've got the next three chapters after this written, so we should be back on the weekly update schedule! ~AiH

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**November 2019, Harvelle's Roadhouse, the Axis Mundi, Heaven**

Wesley would come to define his time in Heaven into six sections, each separated by a 'Big Break'.

The first Big Break occurred when he died and woke up in his university library with all the tea and books he could dream of. The second happened when he finally left his own Heaven, found his way to the Roadhouse and met its motley crew of occupants.

The third Break, of course, happened the instant that Jo, Ash, and Charlie confronted Faith and him about their violent and seditious extracurricular activities, and when two sulking plotters became a group of five intrepid adventurers - Wesley really needed to enlist the others in coming up with a better official name for themselves. After all, they already had a clubhouse.

On the day of the fourth Big Break, the five members of Team Let's Get the Angels Really Really Pissed Off were scattered throughout the front half of the Roadhouse, each working on separate projects. Ash and Jo were playing a lazy game of pool with Ellen and Pamela, having agreed in advance that the losing team would have their heads shaved by the winners. In Heaven, where hair grew back practically overnight, this was not much of a threat, but it would provide some momentary entertainment. And at any rate, they were all out of hair-dye.

Behind the bar, Wesley was taking his turn washing dishes at the industrial-sized sink while Charlie hunched over her laptop on the other side, frowning and typing hellbent for leather away at her computer. Every few minutes, she muttered under her breath, a tirade about why Enochian couldn't have a reasonable syllabary like Russian or Cherokee or Tengwar. At the other end of the bar, their resident Vampire Slayer had one hand in a bowl of peanuts and the other propping open a book against the permanently sticky counter.

It was an unusually relaxed moment, one that Wesley was enjoying in spite of the scalding water reddening his hands. The Watcher was lost in thought, musing on team names and who was least likely to mock him if he brought up the subject. He figured that Charlie was his safest bet. She tended to be the least judgemental.

Humming to himself, the Englishman turned a shot glass over to rinse out the insides. He nearly dropped it three seconds later when the redhead pushed her bar stool back, its legs scraping loudly against the wooden floor, and shrieked, "Eureka! I got it!"

Recovering the soapy glass before it could shatter, Wesley stuck it back beneath the faucet spray. "Got what?" he asked carefully, having learned from painful aural experience that the range of things the computer hacker found exciting could be anything from cute puppies on the Internet to Faith and Jo getting covered in mud when practicing new fight moves during a rainstorm.

She ignored him in search of a more interesting audience. "Faith!" the woman called down the length of the bar. "I'm in!"

"Huh?" The Slayer did not look up from her book. She was halfway through an anthology of Sherlock Holmes case files and had not spoken in hours except to make snarky asides about the titular detective to the room at large.

"I did it!" Charlie crowed triumphantly. "I got through the firewall!"

"What?" Sherlock Holmes and his cases fell to the sticky bar-top, abandoned, as Faith half-jumped, half-slid out of her chair.

"Come look!"

Relaxation time was over. Wesley gave up on his washing. Ash, Jo, and even their opponents dropped their pool cues, and everyone rushed to surround Charlie's computer.

Her laptop screen was split into four windows. The first appeared to be CNN, with multiple talking heads complaining about a president, but miraculously, the banner running across the bottom of the window had a date and time: November 21, 2019, 9:30 a.m.

Assuming the politico show was live, for the first time in forever, they finally knew _when_ they were.

Wes inhaled sharply. He had been dead for fifteen and a half years. He glanced at his reflection in the nearly empty water glass on the counter next to Charlie's elbow. _Not bad__ for a corpse,_ he thought to himself.

In the second window, HBO showed some attractive young adults pretending to be teenagers taking questionable substances in a dimly lit room filled with writhing bodies. In the third, C-span displayed some vote going on in the United States House of Representatives. The fourth window contained a completely black screen with occasional flickers of blue-white light dancing across it.

"Hang on, sorry," said Charlie, and she tapped one key, unmuting her computer.

Everyone stumbled backwards, covering their ears, as a high-pitched screeching filled the room. It seemed to be coming from that dark fourth window and was like shards of glass scraping against steel or the noise made by a particularly unlucky iceberg striking a reportedly unsinkable ship.

"Oops, my bad," gasped the redhead, and she frantically turned down the sound on her laptop until the noise was merely grating instead of unbearable.

Shaken, Ellen lowered her hands from her ears. Her face had gone deathly pale. "What the frak have you kids been doing?" she demanded, her tone equal parts fear and anger, momentarily passing over the fact that Faith and Wesley, at least, were within flirting distance of forty.

"That's Enochian," blurted Wes at the same time. He began patting down his pockets furiously until he found what he sought. The Watcher then started scribbling words onto a piece of paper, his pen blurring across the page as fast as his nerd fingers could go. His hours and hours of studying were paying off at last.

"Oh my god, it worked," Jo breathed as she crowded Charlie's left shoulder.

Ash was more preoccupied with the practicalities. He squinted at the screen, glancing between the TV teenagers doing Ecstasy and the blank window with its still-flashing lights and its torrent of Enochian. "Hope you remembered to cover your tracks."

"There's no way they traced me," Charlie promised him. "I swear. I used all my tricks and coded the whole thing in Enochian and then went in through a dummy IP address a friend of mine set up in Tel Aviv a few years back."

Pamela let out a long, low whistle. Like Ellen, she had gone from fair-skinned to ghost-white, and the color was only now beginning to return to her face. "Hope you're right, kiddo. Otherwise . . ." She glanced at the ceiling overhead and winced. "Well, I suppose it's been a good few years in the afterlife. Probably wasn't going to last forever."

But her concerns, no matter how rational, could do nothing to dim the loud joy of the younger set, who _finally_ had a taste of something like victory.

"Great job, Red," grinned Faith, wide and beaming. The risk of discovery passed in through one ear, made a vague clamor to be heard properly in her brain, and was at once rushed out the other ear. For the first time in eternity, they were making progress, and all she could feel at the moment was excitement. "I could kiss you."

And pushing Jo aside, she leaned in and did just that.

* * *

Once the hacker had recovered enough from the surprise kiss and the blushing that had followed, she retrieved her computer back from Ash and Wesley, who had snuck in while she was briefly distracted. Their heads gathered together, the three mega-nerds used Wesley's celestial linguistic skills and Charlie and Ash's coding know-how in an attempt to write a program that would take the migraine-inducing sounds of Enochian and translate it into text running in a new window at the bottom of the screen.

Faith hovered a few feet away, out of her depth but unable to stop grinning, while Jo had been dragged into a corner by her mother and was struggling to give Ellen an explanation that did not result in a crap-storm falling on all their heads.

"So," Pamela said quietly, standing at the Slayer's elbow. One eyebrow quirked upwards as she watched the nerds hook up Ash and Charlie's laptops together in order to increase their processing power. "Have you been careful?"

"We've tried," answered the Slayer. It was a more or less honest response - just so long as no one asked exactly how hard she had tried.

Arms folded over her stomach, the seer sighed. "I hope it's been enough."

"Me, too," the younger woman admitted softly.

"Well, I suppose there's nothing we can do about it now." Turning, Pamela began walking away. "Ellen!" she called across the room. "Let's get back to our game."

The mother-daughter tete-a-tete broke apart. Jo looked mildly relieved.

"Faith, you wanna take Ash's place?"

"Sure," replied the Slayer with a shrug. "Why not? We really going to do this head-shaving thing though?"

"You afraid?" Ellen taunted her, jerking her chin upwards.

The Slayer retrieved Ash's forgotten pool cue and began chalking up the end. "Not a chance," she sneered back as she got into the spirit of things. "I'd be sexy bald."

"Put your money where your mouth is kiddo."

"You got it."

As the pool match and trash-talking resumed, the nerds kept up their endless typing. After half an hour, when one game of pool had turned into the best two out of three, Charlie let out another squeal of victory. Wesley and Ash exchanged two very self-satisfied smirks. Their translation program had worked!

Admittedly, there was little pertinent information being transmitted along the Heavenly wires at the moment. Merely a list of names of persons who had died in the last 24 hours and who would be admitted to Heaven. Wesley watched the names writing themselves rapidly across the screen. He did not recognize any of them.

Charlie pulled her stool in closer to the bar and propped her elbows up on the counter. "Next stop, _actual_ Earth internet," she announced, her green eyes gleaming.

"We can hack into US satellites first," murmured Ash. "And then everyone else's."

"And get access to any CCTV - _anywhere,_" Charlie continued, daydreaming aloud.

"We'll have eyes anywhere we want."

"Watch any TV that we want."

"See anything that we want."

"Things that were," purred Charlie.

"Things that are . . ."

"And some things that yet may be. But it's not just like the Mirror of Galadriel!" The redhead punched the air. "We can look at anything we want! It's - it's like the frakking Mirror of Erised!"

"'Erised' is 'Desire' spelled backwards," Ash added with a wink and two quick finger guns.

"Nerds," commented Jo lovingly with a giant eye-roll from across the room as she lined up to take her next shot. "You beautiful, beautiful nerds."

"Hold that thought," interrupted Ellen, who had found that there were a few things for which she was willing to overlook her own concerns. "Did they say something about new _television_?"


	10. Winter of Our Discontent, pt 2

**A/N:** Apologies for the delay - I was working nights last weekend. Onwards!

* * *

As it turned out, Faith and Ellen were not the only ones growing tired of the media choices available to them. _Everyone_ wanted something new to watch. And so movies and television joined the constant rounds of pool and poker. Occasionally, even Bobby Singer left his bachelor's nest now to participate in movie nights - provided, of course, that he got to pick the flick.

Team Kick The Angels Where It Hurts tracked the passage of time via the computers. The network of laptops and gaming systems constantly ran a 24-hour news channel and the feed from the angel radio translation program as well as whatever trashy reality show Ash was currently into.

Day after day, they debated the ethics of their new access. Who should they check in on with their boundless CCTV powers? Whose lives should they watch from afar? How should they use the new information to further their goal of conquering - no, not _conquering_, per se - but sorting out exactly what the hell was wrong with Heaven?

When the question was first posed, Faith gave a vehement 'no' to monitoring events in the lives of the people they had known on Earth. It was creepy and stalkerish, and, what was more, she added in confidence to Wesley, who she no longer worried about offending, the dead should not meddle in the affairs of the living. Screwing around with Heaven was one thing, but spying on actual people that they knew? The Slayer had to draw the line somewhere. After all, what's dead needed to stay dead.

Still, she did not stop the others whenever they felt the need to look in on grandparents, cousins, or former partners. Faith just happened to take off on a solo patrol whenever that happened.

Hours merged into days, which grew into weeks, which slowly became months as they carefully translated every word of angel radio, churning out pages and pages of computer files for Jo and Wesley to peer through later. They tracked the movements of angels throughout Heaven, expanding on their hand-drawn maps and lists until they began running out of space on the walls to staple them to.

They listened to angels debating if Lucifer still existed, where the Naphil had gone, what it would take to return the Heavens to their former glory. They listened to the rumors that the archangel Gabriel was - in fact - alive and had been rescued from Hell. They listened to angels arguing and fighting, to them giving and receiving orders, to Heaven struggling to limp along, until they had compiled dossiers thicker than a Gutenberg on every angel who was discussed on the radio.

Team Angels Suck listened and patrolled and mapped and watched hours and hours of television, pretending that they were getting somewhere. But after the initial euphoria of hacking into "Angel wifi," as Ash called it, the bloom began to fade from the rose. Tempers grew shorter as new ideas dried up. Despite the never-ending monitoring, there was never any concrete information to act upon. After a while, the lack of a real plan or purpose began taking its toll on everyone.

It was most notable in Faith, Wesley thought uneasily on more than one occasion. He watched how the Slayer stopped suggesting poker tournaments, how she went on more and more solitary patrols, how she developed a tendency to go just a little too far when training Ash and Charlie in hand-to-hand, and certainly not least, how she had knocked Wesley himself unconscious without realizing it three times in the last two weeks alone.

She always apologized and took the time to bake him cookies from one of Pamela's cookbooks afterwards, but still it worried him. Unwelcome brushes with concussions aside, it was another sign that her self-control was slipping. And Wesley had enough memories of the Slayer without self-control to last him a afterlifetime.

* * *

**February 27th, 2020, the Roadhouse, the Axis Mundi, Heaven**

"We need more info than we're getting by just eavesdropping on angel radio," Faith remarked seriously late one night in February.

In theory, tonight was movie night, but she and Wesley had opted out and were reading alone in the backroom. Everyone else was out in the main part of the Roadhouse, gathered around an old white sheet that they had managed to project images from Charlie's laptop onto, as they all - including Ellen and her husband, Pam, and even Bobby - were huddled together watching the series finale of _Game of Thrones._

Under normal circumstances, Faith would have been among them, but she had given up on _Thrones_ an episode ago. The Slayer felt gut-deep that Danaerys and Cersei had both deserved more impressive endings than the ones they received. She would rather just get the five-minute quick version from Charlie later than sit through another hour of character assassination. As for Wesley, he was in the running for Afterlife's Greatest Books-over-Television Snob, even where HBO was concerned.

While the others were yelling at the television, Watcher and Slayer sat at their customary rickety wooden table, the chairs worn down with what felt like permanent imprints of their respective bottoms. Faith worked her way through _The Silver Chair_ for the second time and worried that she might be starting to identify rather a little too much with Puddleglum.

"Everything seems stable, from what we've heard," Wesley replied amiably. He had a book of classic Keats and a mug of tea and was - in Faith's opinion - disgustingly content.

"Exactly." The Slayer tore the corner off of a napkin and tucked it in between the pages to save her place. Puddleglum and his human charges could wait for a bit. "From what we hear." She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial hiss, "But what if we're only hearing part of the picture?"

"Faith . . ." Wesley closed his Keats and turned his full attention onto her, his subconscious raising a fistful of uncomfortable suspicions. "You may very well be right," he agreed. "Be honest with me. Is this only about information gathering?"

"Of course," answered the Slayer, too quickly and not near convincing enough. "What else would it be about?"

He reached across the table and grabbed her hand from where it rested on _The Silver Chair_, his thumb digging into the fine bones of her palm.

"Quit that, Wes," she told him, but her tone remained mostly friendly and she was only halfway baring her teeth, so the Watcher decided to press his luck.

"We are a team," he reminded her. "Whatever it is that you're planning, we can do this together. _Carefully_."

Faith pulled her hand loose and stood. "We don't need careful, Wes. We need information."

"Meaning you need something to do before you expire from boredom?" he hazarded, his blue eyes staring directly into her brown ones.

Flipping him the middle finger, the Slayer pushed in her chair and left.

"So that went exceedingly well," Wesley grumbled to himself, although he was not entirely surprised. He had rather . . . anticipated this.

The former Watcher had known for weeks now that the Slayer's complacency was on a timer rapidly racing down to zero. Slayers needed action - all of them did - but Faith Lehane needed it perhaps more than most. For all the prefrontal cortexual development that she had thankfully undergone since the age of seventeen, and despite all the reading that he had managed to convince her into, she remained a woman who was happiest when she was hitting things. Unfortunately, the Roadhouse had long run out of novel things to hit that were not, in fact, novels.

Wesley sighed. Perhaps he should run after her to offer backup a second time, but he had a feeling that this was something the Slayer had to handle herself. He only hoped that she could do so and still return in one piece, with most of her limbs and brain cells in the same condition they had been in when she left.

The Englishman took another long, languid sip of his Earl Grey.

_Once a Watcher, always a Watcher,_ he supposed. And what a terribly exhausting business Watching could be.

* * *

Armed with Castiel's sword, a super-soaker filled with holy oil, three Zippo lighters, and a deck of playing cards with angel-banishing wards drawn on them in her own carefully-hoarded blood, Faith moved purposefully through the glaring white hallways that the angels preferred, following her gut and her Doc Martens.

The path was familiar. The Slayer had taken it once before, shortly after her arrival in Heaven, on that long-ago occasion when she had gone to throw fistfuls of her mother's scorched spaghetti at that dingleberry Metatron. While she had not been permitted to murder him for the disaster and calamity that he had wrought upon the Heavens in general and the Winchesters in particular, hurling cold, rancid pasta at the miserable fool had been a cathartic experience.

If only she could solve her current problems by hurling half-rotten spaghetti at them . . .

Smiling grimly at the mental picture that provided, the Slayer stretched her legs into an easy jog. If she remembered correctly, the turn for the jail would be half a mile ahead, on the left. And after that . . . if she took the third right instead and chased that for three miles, she would arrive at the shortcut to the Garden, the gloriously verdant Garden that laid at the center of the Axis Mundi.

Word on angel radio had it that Joshua had been murdered, but surely there would be a way to find the next head honcho in the Garden - Naomi, if Wesley's file-folders could be trusted. The Slayer was rather looking forward to confronting Naomi. She had had enough of dealing with underling angels who Force-choked her into unconsciousness. Faith wanted to take this all the way to the top.

If she ran into any trouble, she would banish every bottom-feeding angel she saw into smithereens. Given how low Heaven's non-human census currently was, the Slayer figured she could do plenty of damage with the fifty-two blood-streaked cards in her pocket, the product of several hours' boredom. Technically fifty-four cards, if one counted the jokers, which Faith always did. You had to, if you wanted to survive.

An hour later, Faith slipped into the Garden as easily as the Serpent had, all those many millennia ago. The scenery had vastly changed since her last little foray here. The trees and bushes were losing their foliage, and the vast masses of rhododendrons had stopped blooming. Not even fallen petals were left to decay upon the ground beneath their branches.

Dry, brown leaves whispered across the cracked earth as the wind hissed to and fro. The birds were silent. Gone were the chattering squirrels. With Joshua dead, it seemed no one truly cared for this place.

A fitting end, thought the Slayer resentfully.

She had never quite liked the story of the Garden of Eden - at least not the version presented in Genesis. During her one encounter with Joshua, she had found the angel to be less than helpful: nice to her face, pleasant as all get out, but far too fond of saying his hands were tied with God gone. As if God had ever been there in the first place.

No, once he'd spun the key in the back of the wind-up toy that was Earth, he'd run off to something else new and shiny, leaving his poorly mechanized creation to run itself straight into walls until it crumpled over sideways, its limbs moving jerkily in place until the battery ran out.

The one good thing about Joshua, Faith supposed, digging at the dry ground with the toe of her Doc Marten, was that he had refrained from punishing the humans who managed to make it to the Garden. So perhaps that made him a hair less of a dick than his comrades. Certainly he had been less of a dick than his Creator. Not that that was a difficult achievement.

The Slayer knew she had a chip on her shoulder the size of Alaska about the whole God thing. She just didn't care.

"Hello?" she called out, angel sword gleaming in her right hand, super-soaker balanced against her opposite hip with her finger on the orange plastic trigger. "Anybody here?"

In her imagination, an angel would leap out from behind the broken, lightning-struck tree trunk to her left. She would spray it with holy oil, flick a lighter onto it, and then ask questions with her sword pressed right against its grace until it pointed the way to Naomi.

But there was only silence, and nothing moved.

_This is like Charn, _Faith thought with a touch of regret, looking up and around her to see if there were two giant, red, dying suns. Damn, but all that reading was turning her into a nerd just like the rest of them.

_I need a drink_, the Slayer told herself emphatically. It was, perhaps, the closest thing she had to a mantra these days.

That, and _Frak me_, which was her other favorite thing to say, and which she said with such fervent frequency that she had already had to have multiple awkward conversations with Ash about how she had not meant it literally.

Sure, there had been that kiss with Charlie a few months ago, but that had been a one and done sort of deal. Girls weren't really Faith's type, for the most part. Not these days, anyway.

Faith continued exploring around the empty garden, yelling taunts to the missing angels at the pale gray sky and kicking at thorny vines as she went.

Finally, she mused, finally here was a part of Heaven without pretenses. A part of Heaven that revealed the truth of the whole rotten enterprise - a part of Heaven that was failing, dying, _dead_.

It looked, Faith reflected with a flash of bitter insight and a twist of her mouth, almost exactly the way she felt on the inside.


	11. Winter of Our Discontent, pt 3

**A/N: **Angst ahead! Thanks to everyone for taking the time to read this chapter. :)

* * *

**February 2020, the Garden, Heaven**

Faith set up shop on the horizontal trunk of a fallen olive tree and started a small fire with a pile of its branches, a few good super-soaker squirts of holy oil, and a touch of her lighter. She held her hands out a scant six inches away from the fire and allowed the almost-painful heat to warm her from the outside in. It was the best she could do, as she was out of alcohol to warm herself from the inside out.

She had stomped around the Garden for nearly two hours before giving up on the place as abandoned. Now, the Slayer was rather at her wit's end about what step in her half-assed plan came next.

Sure, she had done some basic research on angelic summoning rituals, but there was not much specific beyond archangels. Besides, she was missing several key ingredients if she wanted to light an occult fire under Naomi's ass and summon her down to the Garden. Not to mention the location of the head angel's office was one of the few things that still eluded Ash's terrifyingly detailed mapping.

Return was not an option, either. While the Slayer could certainly go back, admit defeat, and face Wesley's too-knowing eyes and his too-understanding smile, Faith knew herself well enough to realize that she was in dire need of something to punch, and she was beginning to run out of excuses for punching Wesley. The man deserved better after all.

Faith crossed her arms over her chest and frowned. That was rather the problem, wasn't it? Everybody seemed to always be deserving better - _always_.

_And what do I deserve? _the woman wondered, nudging a stick into the fire with her shoe. It was an exhausting question and one that she was tired of asking. Because it did not seem to matter what she wanted or what she deserved - she was still stuck here, bored out of her mind, with nothing to take the pressure off except for books.

Books! The Slayer hawked up a gob of spit onto the dirt next to her tree trunk to demonstrate what she thought of that. Sure, some of the reading was pretty good, but she could feel her afterlife just creeping past her while she sat on her keister and read. Not that there was anything much in her afterlife better than reading. And G-d, wasn't that a horrifying thought?

She was startled out of her self-indulgent navel-gazing by an icy voice speaking from overhead: "You've made quite a nuisance of yourself."

Glancing up from the earth, her angel sword and super-soaker coming into reflexive guard positions, Faith stared at the intruder - a middle-aged woman who appeared more business person-like than any business person Faith had ever met. The female figure wore her brown hair up in a bun so tight that it would have made a human woman's eyes water.

Her voice was crisp and cool, striving for emotionless, but her gray eyes betrayed her. They were hard and unfeeling, and they glimmered with hatred. She eyeballed the Slayer in the same way that one would look down on a particularly nasty bug just prior to squashing them underfoot.

"Nice entrance," said Faith, rising to her feet and sidling to the right in order to keep the holy oil blaze directly in between herself and the newcomer. "It's Naomi, isn't it?"

The angel's nostrils flared once angrily. It was as good as an admission. "You aren't quite as stupid as I've been led to believe."

"No," agreed the Slayer, unbothered by the familiar insult. Everyone called her stupid at some point or another. Might as well get it over with right out of the gate. "Just stupid enough to come here looking for you."

"You _fool_."

If that was the best that Naomi could come up with, a snide voice noted inside Faith's head, then she needed to enroll in Charlie's school of "Using Classic Shakespearean Insults in Less-than-Classic Situations." It had been a real disturbing afternoon.

Naomi continued on, unaware of the Slayer's inner commentary, "You have _no_ idea what is at risk. You and your little friends, running around, distracting angels and taking away resources at a time that is most critical - when . . . " she paused.

"When there's a Naphil on the loose, and alternate dimensions are being opened, and archangels are hopping around like bedbugs?" Faith supplied in a tone of pseudo-innocence. She took one slow step closer to the fire. A little smoke inhalation never hurt anyone. A little pissed-off angel, on the other hand . . . that could get dangerous fast.

The movement did not pass unnoticed. "Using holy oil for a bonfire, trying to threaten angels with the flames. You have no sense of the sacred, do you?"

"Lost it somewhere around the time my mother started hooking," the Slayer snarked back with equal parts sarcasm and honesty.

Gritting her teeth, the angel remarked, "I really should kill you."

"Sounds like a good plan."

Had she been on the other side, Faith would have happily squashed herself like the insect that the angels thought she was. For all their rebellion, for all their dashing in and out of one another's heavens, for all their close encounters with angel kind, no one had ever attempted to bring celestial wrath down upon the Roadhouse, and it made absolutely zero sense to her.

"Which brings me to my main question - why haven't you? If I'm such a burr under your tail, if all I do is constantly piss off you and your Heavenly Host, why in God's name haven't you done something about it?"

Naomi froze, seething. Her nostrils flared a second time.

"You can't, can you?" asked the Slayer, slowing putting two and two together out loud. "That's it. That's gotta be it. It's the only thing that makes some kind of twisted sense. You _actually_ can't kill me.

"Although it's pretty damn clear that you'd like to," she added when Naomi's hands curled into fists. "Why can't you?"

"There is a law," the angel replied curtly. "When the Darkness . . ." she grimaced, the words sour on her tongue, then started over.

"When _Amara_ reconciled with our Lord, before he vanished _again_," the angel spat, ". . . our Lord made one final visit to the Garden to speak with Joshua - not to assist, not to bless, not to create more angels and fill our ranks and restore Heaven to the glory of his ineffable Plan - but to once again bend the system in the favor of his precious little humans, the Winchesters."

Drops of spittle sizzled on the flames, and Naomi required a moment to collect herself before she could go on. "_You_ are here because of that visit. I cannot cast you out because of Him. I cannot destroy you because of Him. I cannot burn your little clubhouse to the ground and thrust you and your little friends into the depths of Heaven's most secure jail because of Him. Because Dean Winchester asked the God of Heaven and Earth and All Things That In Them Are to make sure that _you_ \- sinner, whore, murderer - were happy and safe in Heaven."

Faith chewed this over in silence, rearranging her understanding of the universe as the holy fire crackled. She kept her eyes fastened on Naomi's and waited for the angel to do something with all that anger pent up inside.

When Naomi made no quick and sudden violent movements toward her, the Slayer cleared her throat. "Well, you're falling down on the job there a little bit, Secretary General. I'm light-years away from happy."

The angel rolled her eyes. "No one is happy these days, you idiot. Look around you - Heaven can no longer sustain itself in its proper glory. And still we get on with things as best we can."

Raising an eyebrow, the woman wondered, "So that's all you've got? Keep calm and carry on?"

"Yes."

"And you can't kill me?"

"No." Naomi exhaled through her teeth. "Much as I would dearly like to, I cannot. None of us can."

"Alirael tried," Faith pointed out mildly.

"Alirael is free to try. She is not bound by the commands of God Himself, as Joshua was bound, and as I am bound since his death."

This made sense, as far as it went. Faith mulled this over and then wondered, "So that's why you aren't trying now?"

Her question pushed past the last remaining dregs of Naomi's patience. The angel snapped her fingers. Suddenly, all the air had fled from Faith's lungs, and she was choking and crashing to the earth. Only by luck did she manage not to fall face-first into the fire.

"I am not _trying_," snarled Naomi, "because I have far too many other things to do today. Because you are beneath my notice. Because I can do _this _for a while," she twisted her fist, and the Slayer groaned and retched up a stream of bright red blood, "but since I cannot do it forever, it loses its entertainment value."

She snapped her fingers again, and the vomiting stopped, and Faith could breathe again. The Slayer rolled onto her side, further away from the fire, and slowly pushed herself up onto her knees. She was covered in ashes.

"I am finished here," the angel announced coolly. "I have no more time to satisfy your curiosity. You must leave the Garden and return to your cabal of overly eager humans."

"Sure thing," said Faith. She paused to cough the remaining blood out of her mouth and to take a deep, shuddering breath. Her chest ached like a herd of pink elephants had just sat on it. "I've got one last question before I go, though. You got the new Death's cell phone number?"

Surprise briefly flashed across Naomi's face but was quickly replaced by her previous disgust.

"You truly are desperate," she said with distaste.

"So are you," the Slayer reminded her. "Now, do you got those digits for me or not?"

"I may," admitted the angel begrudgingly, "but I will require something of you first."

"Fine," said the Slayer, lifting her shirt up by the hem. She stopped shortly before her belly button. "Heads up, I've got a strict one-boob-per-favor flashing policy."

Naomi winced. "No. Stop. That was not what I meant. There is no reason why I would ever want - Just . . ." she inhaled and exhaled, her jaw clenching and unclenching with each breath. "If I tell you how to contact Death, will you go away and _stay _away?"

"Sure," lied Faith, who had no intentions of keeping that promise if it did not benefit her. She lowered her t-shirt and brushed some dirt off of her elbow. "Just point the way."

The way, as luck would have it, was not so much of a road or a portal as it was Naomi making a series of very complicated gestures with her hands and then, her eyes blazing with a white fire so bright that Faith had to shade her eyes with a hand and squint, slicing her own angel sword against her hand, stabbing the sword into the ground, and slamming her bleeding hand down on the cracked earth beside it.

Through half-closed eyelids, Faith watched and listened closely, filing every movement away into the back of her mind, in case she would need to reproduce this later.

There came a rush of dark clouds, a clap of thunder, and a woman all in black appeared, wearing a long, leather duster that would have made Spike drool and Angel bilious with jealousy. On the fourth finger of her right hand gleamed a large silver ring with a glowing, flat opal. That same hand had its black-painted fingers curled around the wooden staff of a scythe, its blade plain grey. The scythe lacked ornamentation yet gave off such an impression of _sharpness_ that the dead foliage and even the air around it seemed to shiver.

"Naomi," said the woman in black, tilting her chin downwards minutely in a gesture of acknowledgement.

Naomi rose to her feet, her hand already healed. She returned the acknowledgment with an equally small nod. The nod indicated respect but point-blank refused to extend so far as deference.

Thunder clapped a second time, now accompanied by a flash of white lightning. Naomi vanished, leaving the latest manifestation of Death free to turn her full attention to the rather grimy Vampire Slayer and her still-smoldering holy fire.

"Faith Lehane." The voice of Death was neither high nor gravelly but _heavy _in a way that caught the heart and carried it straight down into the shoes. It was a serious voice, a _significant_ voice, a voice that spoke of eternity, of the very beginning and all of the many, many, many ends. It was a voice that commanded shock and awe, fear and trembling.

To this ancient voice, Faith responded with the tried and true method of lesser beings responding to ancient powers - by opting for light sarcasm when they should have been cowering. Quipping was the Vampire Slayer way, after all, not to mention a mainstay in the arsenal of plucky young heroes and antiheroes everywhere. And what little Faith hadn't inherited from her Slayer fore-sisters, she had absorbed through osmosis while around Spike and Angel.

She nodded to Death, the same nod that Naomi had given but jerking her chin upwards instead of down. Dean Winchester had supplied her with a name, and she used it now. "How you doin', Billie Jean?"

The Reaper-turned-Death's face remained spectacularly unimpressed, but Faith grinned at her own joke anyway. The Big Bosses never appreciated the plucky adventurer's sense of humor. That was written down somewhere, too, one of the ineffable rules of the universe.

"So you are the reason Naomi called a meeting." Billie gave the Slayer an elevator glance, sweeping from the top of her head down to her scuffed Doc Martens and back up to the woman's face. From the growing furrow between her brows, she was not pleased with what she saw. Death crossed the arm not holding a scythe over her stomach, resting her free hand in the crook of her opposite elbow. "I hope you aren't going to waste my time."

"Guess we'll find out. Talking to you - kinda high up on my to-do list. I mean, I even made a deal with an angel for it." A deal that she had no intention of keeping, of course, but Billie did not need to know that.

The super-powerful being opposite her remained skeptical. "And I suppose you're expecting congratulations for finding me?"

"It's funny," Faith continued with a grimacing twist to her lips, channeling the plucky adventurer energy for all it was worth. "That made me feel dirtier than making a deal with a devil."

"Which you have done," Billie pointed out coolly.

The Slayer did not bristle at the reminder of her past. "Technically, the Mayor was only ascending into a proper demon," she corrected. "Not quite a devil yet. And the only funny business I've done at crossroads has been . . ." She let the sentence trail away suggestively and then coughed. "Anyway, the deal wasn't so much my soul in exchange for my deepest wish as it was murdering people for a nice apartment and a father figure."

"Which is worse. Clearly."

"To-may-to, to-mah-to," Faith shrugged and stuck her angel sword through her belt loop for safe-keeping. It was useless against Billie, and threatening Death was not exactly what she had come here for.

Death stared at her through narrowed eyes. "What is it you want, then?" she asked after a moment. "I am not a Magic 8 ball, and I do not easily reverse the decisions of Fate - unlike some other Powers I could mention," she sniffed dismissively.

"Fair enough," said Faith. She eyed Billie's long leather duster and was reminded of a story Spike had told once about the night in the nineteen-seventies when he had murdered a Slayer and stolen her coat when he finished. That in turn reminded her of another story the blond vampire had shared, when he was off on one of his Buffy-driven tirades, drunk on self-pity and heartbreak.

For a moment, she could hear him beside her, crooning about Slayers and dancing and death being their art in a slightly slurred Cockney burr.

_Death is on your heels, baby,_ he'd mumbled as he had leant against her shoulder, stabbing the lit end of his cigarette into the back of his other hand to feel something other than the pain of Buffy rejecting him once again. _That's what I told 'er. Exactly like that, I said it.'Death is on your heels, baby, and sooner or later, it's gonna catch you.' _

_And it did, _the vampire had added with another press of his cigarette to his skin. _Death caught up with her, and then I regretted everything I'd ever said to her and everything I hadn't. And then she came back, and it started all over again. All over and over and over again._

Faith had taken the cigarette away from him then to smoke it herself, shaking it free of any potential vampire dust first. Accidental ingestion of vamp ash during a stake free-for-all was one thing. That had been another.

The memory flashed through Faith's mind in an instant, accompanied by a rush of warmth and fondness for her old friend. As she remembered his misery, she could almost smell the cheap smokes he had been so fond of, and she came at last to the conclusion that she had been toying around with off and on for the last several months. The Slayer raised her chin defiantly and looked Billie in her dark, bottomless eyes.

"I'm here," she said, enunciating each word with care, "because I want you to kill me."

There was a pause, and then the new Death shook her head, chuckling in amusement. "You and your boyfriend, you're both just dying to end things, aren't you?"

"Well?" said Faith, who appreciated neither being laughed at nor the unceasing references to Dean Winchester. She was getting rather damn sick of both. To stop the laughter, she squirted her super-soaker at the smoldering holy oil fire, and a gust of flame burst upwards. "So can you do it?"

"I _could_," mused Billie. "I could do a whole lotta things." Her lips pulled away into the beginnings of a snarl. "Arrange a permanent downstairs transfer, send you out into the cold dark empty - "

"Chained like Morgoth beyond the circles of the world . . ." Faith elaborated on the thought without meaning to.

The snarl transformed into a bemused frown. "Didn't realize you were much of a Tolkien fan," Death remarked.

"I wasn't," the Slayer replied sharply. "Got entirely too much time on my hands up here. And not near enough to do with it."

"And still you have not managed to learn enough respect to stop interrupting people."

"I respect things," Faith said in a thoroughly unconvincing manner. She kicked another piece of olive wood into the flames. "When they earn it." Then she smiled, shark-like, and went on, "You haven't earned it, Billie Jean."

"You are one irreverent piece of work." Death swung back from irritation to amusement.

"So I've been told," answered the Slayer as she shot more holy oil out of her super-soaker onto the bonfire.

"And you want me to kill you."

"That's what I said."

Faith felt no hesitancy, no regret. Sure, Wes'd be pissed when he found out what she'd done - _if _he ever found out what she'd done, the little voice in her head pitched in helpfully - but he was better off without her. They always were. And every cell of her body was screaming for this to just be over already. It was time to end the dance.

Billie adjusted her grip on her scythe and tilted her head slightly, as if considering the Slayer's request. "Why?"

"Because I'm asking nicely. Because I'm ready to move on. Because I can be annoying as hell and I _will_ be, until you say yes."

"I _could_ do it," Death thought aloud, drawing her sentences out. "I could put you out in the empty, break your soul down to atoms, make you cease to exist. I could definitely do that."

She paused for just long enough for Faith's hopes to rise. "Yes, I could kill you. But I won't."

The unholy bastard child of a groan and a scream fought its way past the Slayer's clenched teeth. She ground them tighter in an attempt to force down the rush of hopelessness that swamped her, black and damp and reeking of abandoned caves and rotten fish. "And why not?" she demanded. To her shame, her voice broke on the last word.

Billie smirked cruelly. "Because Dean Winchester needs you. Or at least he needs the idea of you. Something to hold on to. Something to _hope_ for. Something to have _faith_ in."

_So much for impartiality, _Faith thought, at once relieved to have an answer and furious with the answer itself.

"And that's the game, then?" she said after a brief silence, the words leaking out. She could taste the despair that accompanied them, acrid and metallic on her tongue. "The world needs Winchesters, so I'm frakking trapped here until they've done whatever big thing you people want them to do, and then we'll all be disposable again? Is that it?"

"Have a little faith, won't you?" Death's smirk widened. "Trust the Powers That Be."

"I'm more of a stabber, not a truster," Faith snapped back. "And, honestly? I think the whole damn system would work so much better without any of you idiots who pretend to run it and instead just sit on your asses and play games with people."

"Maybe." Billie took a step closer to the bonfire and extended her left hand over it, palm down, to feel its warmth. "But that's the way the system works."

"It's a frakking stupid system," the Slayer retorted hotly. "I'm pretty sure I could make a better one - or at least I know people who could."

"There are better ones on the television all the time." The former Reaper stared down at the flames and then added without glancing up, "You are not the only one less than thrilled to discover that this is the way the world works, you know."

"No?"

"No. Although that does not change that this is the system we live in. And we all have our roles to play."

Following Death's gaze, Faith also watched the wood in the bonfire as one of the bottom logs slowly crumbled into a pile of smaller chunks surrounded by glittering embers. After gathering her thoughts, she spoke again, "So, moral of the story, you won't kill me or send me to the Empty or do anything that would be just the littlest bit helpful because this damn world full of angels and demons and Useless Powers That Be Sitting on Their Asses needs Winchesters to function."

"That's how it goes," Death agreed, still staring into the fire. She looked up and met the Slayer's gaze, then added with poison masquerading as kindness, "And Dean Winchester needs _you_ to function."

"Frak him," said Faith, bitterness personified. Momentarily, she considered walking into the fire. It would provide a momentary distraction, at any rate. "And frak you, too," she went on angrily. "And frak everyone and everything and -"

"Yes." Billie shut her down, with a bored yawn. "We've covered this ground already. Personally, I would be more than happy to end your existence . . . if it was only up to me."

The Slayer shoved another agonized shriek down deep into her gut where it belonged. She would be angry, she would be furious, she would be snarky and surly, but she would _not_ cry. That much, at least, she owed herself.

"That doesn't help me one damn bit, and you know it."

"I do know that," said Billie. "I also don't care."

Wind rustled through the dry branches, scattering the few remaining dead leaves and blowing them down to the ground. When the leaves settled, Billie was gone. She had taken the last of Faith's hope with her.

"G-ddammit," snarled the Slayer, sinking back down onto her olive tree trunk. Her fingers dug into the gnarled wood.

Alone, there was no need for continued restraint. Abandoning self-control, she spewed out a heartfelt string of fluent curses, ending only when her breath ran out with a final litany of 'fraks'.

She took one deep, shuddering breath, then threw her head back, turned her face up to the gray sky, and screamed, "_FRAK ME_!"

The words echoed through the empty air and then came faintly back to her : "-ak ee ak ee ak ee ak ee."

"G-d_dammit,_" Faith repeated, and she thought she had never meant the word as intensely as she did now. The Slayer ran a hand over her face. It left a streak of dirty wood ash across her nose and cheeks, but she did not care. "I need a frakking drink."


	12. Winter of Our Discontent, pt 4

**February 2020, Harvelle's Roadhouse, the Axis Mundi, Heaven**

After he finished becoming reacquainted with Keats, Wesley laid the thin volume on the empty chair next to him. Intermission consisted of a quick bathroom run, and then he started on the next book on his list: a five-hundred-page biography of the Brontë Sisters. The Englishman was beginning to long for a fresh-brewed pot of tea when the door to the back room banged open.

Charlie and Jo burst through the doorway at the same time in a tangle of elbows and knees, their faces twisted into anxious frowns.

Something had happened, the Watcher concluded with grim fatalism before the women had even opened their mouths. Something far from good. Of course. Wesley restrained the urge to glance at his watch. Acid worry bubbled in the pit of his stomach. It was about time, after all.

The blonde hunter spoke first. Her voice vibrated with tension. "You've gotta go out there, Wes."

Closing the biography, Wesley had a sinking feeling that he already knew what the answer to his next question would be. The Slayer had been gone for approximately three hundred pages' reading time - and that was certainly long enough for impending catastrophe or to kick off a mini-apocalypse. He stood up from his seat and retrieved the silver sword resting on the chair beside his book of poetry. Best to be prepared. "Where and what am I going out to, exactly?"

"Faith," came the quick reply, confirming his suspicions. "She's sitting on the back steps."

There was a pause as Jo struggled to phrase whatever strange thing it was the Slayer had decided to do. "She's playing with a knife."

"And what makes this different from the other times that Faith plays with a knife?" asked Wesley gruffly. He tucked the sword under one arm and wondered if there might be a tranquilizer gun lying around somewhere. Just in case.

"She's sharpening it on her own skin."

"And she's got dead eyes," Charlie added in a rush. "Like a shark or something. It's creepy, man. Like, the lights are on, but nobody's home. I'm not touching her."

"I thought about it, for like a minute," said Jo bravely. "But she didn't even look at us when we called her name. And since she wasn't actively bleeding out, we decided to check in here for you, first. You know, since you two actually knew each other back on earth."

"And have all that _history_," said Charlie with emphasis, who had thoroughly researched her afterlife companions in the last few months while they were not paying attention. Unlike her physical body, her cheerful paranoia had not charred to ashes in a funeral pyre.

Wondering for the ten thousandth time when he had been elected to the role of proverbial "grown-up" in the group, Wesley adjusted his grip on his sword, sighed, and headed outside.

As promised, he found the Slayer sitting on the fragmented concrete step at the back door. Her sleeves and pant legs had been rolled up haphazardly, and a score of shallow cuts were scattered in an aimless pattern over her ankles and forearms, slowly oozing. The drips of blood had begun to coalesce on the broken step beneath her, forming a small puddle already seeping into the concrete. Her angel sword was balanced against her leg, and a celestial-memory copy of the Winchester's nasty demon-killing knife was clenched in her hand, its point lodged firmly against her left wrist. The Slayer was tracing a thin, red infinity sign with the tip.

She glanced up from her bloody work as the door opened behind Wesley. He stepped out onto the back step to join her. The Slayer's face was a mess of dirt, her brown hair tangled with bits of dead leaves in the back, but her eyes were neither red-rimmed nor bloodshot. Still, when she turned to stare at him, the man caught a strong whiff of the liver-wrecking moonshine that Bobby Singer had recently started brewing, and a half-empty Mason jar sat on the ground in front of her.

"So, let me guess, the tenderfoots got scared and went running for Mommy. Is that it?" she scoffed angrily. The fumes wafting off of her breath could have out-scorched a dragon. Faith narrowed her eyes at him, her mouth twisting sourly. "Nice sword," she jutted her chin towards his left hip. "Whaddya want, Wes?"

Wesley sighed. Some days, there were neither enough books nor tea in Heaven for this. He was far from an amateur therapist - let alone a professional - but he supposed he would have to do his best. England did expect it of every man, after all. "Budge up."

The Slayer did not scoot over, but she did at least stop man-spreading and bring her knees closer together. Wesley supposed he would have to be content with that. He sat on the cracked step next to her and set his sword carefully down on the ground. The Watcher was unconcerned about getting blood on his trousers. Unlike the secretions of certain demon species, human blood would only stain his clothing, not burn through it into his skin.

"Interesting pattern of self-decoration," he commented impassively. "Skipped straight over tattooing and creative body piercing, have you?"

"I found the head angel in charge," she answered instead.

The Englishman's hands covered hers, gently tugging the knife away out of her grip. To his relief, Faith did not struggle. As she released the hilt, Wesley felt fine tremors transmitting themselves from her hand into his. He calmly wiped the knife blade on the sleeve of his jacket, his concern growing.

Doing a bit of man-spreading himself, Wesley moved a hair closer, close enough to offer a sturdy presence, close enough for warmth to be felt in the chill of the Axis Mundi, but not so close as to touch. Touching an amped up Slayer was not the best idea under regular circumstances, and they were rapidly slipping deeper and deeper into irregular territory.

"Is that where you've been all this time?" he asked in a mild tone. "Angel hunting?"

"More or less." Her tone evasive, Faith did not meet his eyes. Instead, she held two fingers against the bleeding infinity sign.

"Do you want to go inside?" Wesley suggested. "You can tell me - and the others - all about the more and the less. In whatever order you like."

"No." Shaking her head decisively, the Slayer removed her fingers. The oozing had slowed. She spat into her palm and rubbed the saliva into the cuts on her wrist.

"Why not?"

Her shoulders hunching upwards around her ears, Faith did an excellent impression of huffing and puffing and considering blowing the house down. "It's not a good story, Wes."

"I had gathered that from how you've decided to redecorate the pavement."

Faith looked up long enough to roll her eyes to show what she thought of that remark. "I don't want to ruin things for the peanut gallery," she continued seriously. "It wasn't the happy news hour, okay? I want them to be able to continue thinking that there's some point to all of this. Someone should be enjoying Heaven. Just because you and I can't."

"I enjoyed it," Wesley corrected her, not unkindly. "For ten years or so, I enjoyed it. But then - " _But then you came along. _He kept that particular thought to himself.

The Slayer trudged on without pausing to hear all the things that he wasn't saying. "But then it all sours. Memories aren't real people. You can't have real sex with them," she added in her own attempt at humor. "And they're – always the same. They don't change. And you're not – you're not who you were when all of this started out.

"And nothing," she swallowed harshly, her voice thick with barely-restrained frustration, "absolutely _nothing_ matters." She scratched at one of the longer cuts on her leg with a dirty fingernail. "Nothing effing matters."

Wesley did his best to follow her train of thought. "Hence the self-harm?"

Faith said nothing, which was an admission enough in and of itself.

"Interesting choice of location. You had to have known that someone would find you here. Would that then make this a cry for help?" Rather peevishly and because he was only human after all, he added, "If memory serves, the last time you tried a violent cry for help, it didn't exactly work out too well for either of us."

The Slayer flipped him off with both hands. "Chill your pants, princess. I'm carving up myself this time. You ain't got nothing to worry about."

"That's not why I'm concerned."

"Sure it wasn't," Faith said curtly. She huffed again. "How can you . . . how come you haven't gone totally batsh-t yet, Wes?"

"I've been here longer than you," he reminded her, with a soft nudge of his elbow. "Little though it is, and fruitless though you seem to find it – you're going to have to explain all of your little adventure to me once we finish with _this," _he gestured to the knife and the blood, all in one. "Frankly, this venture that we have going is much . . . busier than what filled my memories before. But to be honest, in the beginning, I appreciated – I _needed_ – the peace. My death was . . . far from peaceful. Except for the very end."

Wesley hoped that the Slayer would not press further. She was rather terrible at taking hints. It was not that Faith lacked the ability to recognize hints; she simply chose when and how she wanted to respect them. Thankfully, her own preoccupations preserved his privacy for once.

"I don't want peace," she remarked sourly instead of chasing down the trail of how exactly Wesley had died. "I'd rather have oblivion."

Wesley considered saying something, but stopped. And then he thought, and then again he stopped. Finally, he opened his mouth and asked a question to which he already knew the answer. "Are you quite all right?"

"I'm fine," she replied with a sickeningly sweet and blatantly false grin. "Five by five, sweetheart." Casting her mask aside, the Slayer rubbed at another of her cuts and grumbled, "Mother-humping eternity. Why the frak can't it ever end?"

"Nature of the word itself, I'm afraid," mused Wesley, turning the demon-killing knife end over end over end in his hands. It truly was a remarkable creation. "And because, if your friends' tales are anything to go by, this world and its multitude of afterlives were created by a set of powers who are indifferent at best and maliciously cruel at worst."

Faith attempted to retrieve the knife, but he batted her hand away easily. Her heart was not in it.

"Let it be. Cutting is not going to help."

"You can't say that," the Slayer shot back, glowering. "You don't got a clue as to what's going on."

'So why don't you enlighten me. What happened on your little walkabout? You've been gone for hours."

"Fine," she exhaled slowly, although her reluctance seemed more of a show than the real deal. Then, "There's probably something else that I should tell you first."

"Go on."

Faith muttered, "So a while back - like a giant long while back - like before Charlie busted down Celestial Comcast while back, Dean showed up in my frigging memories again. Not the memory-version of him either. The real one. And it was . . . a bit not good. Maybe more than a bit not good. Maybe just a lot not good."

"You didn't mention anything." In spite of his better judgement, the omission stung.

"I was . . . Sh-t, Wes, I didn't want anybody to know. Didn't want word to get out. Because after today, it has been made _very_ clear to me that according the whole damn Heavenly host, I'm just some white trash mentally ill skank who slept her way up here by getting Dean Winchester all hot and bothered with my lady parts."

Wesley grimaced. Luckily for him, Faith did not notice.

"And more than that, sure, yeah, maybe that was the real him. But the rest of the time, it's not. It's just me and my sh-tty memories and a bar full of rednecks and nerds and angels telling me how I don't deserve to be here, and yeah, maybe I don't. Maybe I don't deserve to be in Heaven. God knows I've done things I can never atone for - to Buffy, to Angel, to you -

"And - " The floodgates had been opened, and the outpouring torrent of glum misery could not be stopped. "And I don't even know if I want to be here. When I'm being honest. But guess what, Wes? That doesn't matter. Because apparently it's all about Dean."

He waited for her to continue.

"I spoke to Death," she added in an even tone that was not reassuring in the slightest.

"Who?"

"Fill you in later," Faith waived facts away. Right now, if she had to explain herself to Wesley, if she had to talk about her damn _feelings_, she would do it in the order that she wanted to. "While I was out. I found Naomi – we were right, she _did_ take over from Joshua – and then I talked to the Reaper who's currently running the Death-show. I had some questions."

"Which questions?" Wesley asked shrewdly.

The Slayer waved her hand again. "Not important right now. But no matter who I talked to, it all came back the same."

"The same how?"

"Like it's all about Dean. Like the entire reason I'm not roasting on some spit is because of one stupid guy and I . . ." Faith scratched at her shins. "I think I hate him for it. I think I hate him, and I miss him, and I want to never see him again, and yet I still want to see him - the real him, not some Potemkin mock-up - every damn time I wake up in this damn place."

"A long time ago, you mentioned that you thought he might be your soulmate," her audience hazarded.

"Frak that. I don't want to have a soulmate. I . . . I just . . . I want to kill something, or - or frak something, and I _can't_."

Her voice cracked, and Faith took a handful of deep breaths before going on quietly, "I don't know how much more of this I can take. And I don't know what it is that I want out of this. Except that I just want _out_."

A single angry tear slipped free from the corner of her left eye and trailed alongside her nose. "I want out, Wesley. However _out _works. I want to _die_."

The Slayer wiped at her dusty, smudged cheeks as more tears streaked down her face. "But here's the kicker, Wes. Naomi, Death, neither of them's willing to help me with that. I'm too important to Dean Winchester, so no one will let me die."

And there was nothing he could say to that – no comfort he could offer. For what did you say to a suicidal person who was already dead? Hang in there, it gets better? Wesley watched her, mouth empty, mind scrambling, as the Slayer curled in around her knees, her fingers clawing into her ankles and leaving half-moon scrapes in their wake.

Finally, he said, "I had no idea it was this bad - "

"I didn't want you to," Faith said sharply. "And, no offense, Wes, but you knowing wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference. I'm dead. And all I want is just to not exist. That is literally all that I want. I mean," she snorted hysterically, "I'd almost settle for a good eight-month coma right about now. Which is not something that I _ever_ thought I'd say."

"So . . ." she said after a long moment, having finally shell-shocked the man next to her into silence, "what does your big English brain have to say about that?"

He scrambled to find something to say. What came out was less eloquent than he had hoped for. "Full fathom five," murmured Wesley.

"Great." The Slayer threw her hands up and lightly smacked him on the shoulder. "I've broken you now, too. That's not it, dude. It's _five by five_, not whatever the hell weird thing it was that you just said."

"Full fathom five," he repeated himself, louder and with more confidence.

"Still making zero sense. And that's my job."

Wesley's posture shifted. His shoulders rolled back and his spine straightened.

Faith could sense the Shakespeare coming. "Spit it out." She brushed her nose against a relatively clean patch on her forearm. "Come on, let's get this over with."

He didn't have a bad voice, to be honest. Not near as good as Giles' had been, back before his return to pre-teenagerdom, but it was decently British, and Faith could appreciate that.

Wesley cleared his throat and began speaking, his voice rising and falling with the iambic pentameter. "Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange."

"My father ain't in Heaven," the Slayer said shortly. Although nice to listen to, Wesley's forays into recitation still frustrated her. She hated having to ask him to explain. To make matters worse, even when she understood the words themselves, Wesley had a weird way of quoting things that made no sense on their surface.

Luckily, after four score and seven rounds of playing this game, the Watcher knew what was expected of him if he wanted to avoid eating a knuckle sandwich for his next three meals. "It's from the Tempest."

"The one about the shipwreck?"

Wesley smiled, and a brief glimmer of pleasure flashed across his face. "Yes."

"Makes sense. So somebody drowned." Faith could rather empathize with the drowning part, but she did not have a clue about what Wesley was getting at. "How does it – what made you think of that just now?"

Wesley's expression grew pensive. "Because we – you and I and Ash and Jo and Bobby Singer and every person in this Roadhouse – lay full fathom five, Faith. And in this sea of continuing past and interminable present, it is impossible _not_ to suffer a sea change. I believe one of the reasons for your . . . " he paused.

The woman rolled her eyes. She could only tolerate so much tact. "Just say it. You don't have to tip-toe. Go ahead and call it a giant hissy fit. I won't shank you."

". . . Your pain," he finished firmly instead, "is in part because you are not the same person who lived through those memories - or even the same woman that you were when you first arrived in Heaven and re-experienced them. To be human is to change. And that does not stop once the heart stops. Static - even if a perfect static - can never satisfy that which continues to evolve."

"Except for your books. You seem pretty damn satisfied with them."

"The exception that proves the rule."

"Hmm." She considered this for a few seconds. "I guess that was better than the time you and Ash did Romeo and Juliet, I guess."

"I thought MisCast night was rather a hit?"

"Not even close." The Slayer let out a loud exhale. "You've certainly mastered the strange part, Wesley. Think there's any way we can start working being rich?"

"Not sure what good fundraising does when you're dead."

"Ha. Tell that to every vampire I've ever met."

Wesley paused. He had something else stuck in his head, something that he had been hesitant to bring up until now.

"Faith, be honest with me. Were you _trying_ to commit suicide by angel earlier today?"

The Slayer shifted her weight on the concrete step until she was facing him fully. "Not initially," she admitted in a quiet voice. Her brown eyes were locked on his blue ones. "But then I got to the Garden, and it's all dead now, and I thought, _hey, that looks just like me_, and I thought . . . thought I should take things all the way to the top to get answers."

"So you went looking for Naomi?"

"Well, mostly I just yelled and burned things and let my petty vandalism flag fly in the Garden until she came and found me. Didn't take near as long as I thought it might, so I guess that's something. I was pretty damn sure that she was going to try to do me in. I mean," Faith chuckled without humor, "Alirael hates me so much that we all know she wants to smash me into soul dust, so I figured Naomi would want to do the same thing, too.

"But she didn't try anything, and I got to asking questions, first of her, then of Billie. I guess by then maybe I was trying to provoke them into something. Hadn't set out to do it. Not until I saw the Garden."

"And yet here you are."

"Here I am. Because it turns out that Death's every bit as happy to use me as a hostage up here as the angels are. I . . ." Faith twisted away, looking down at her shoes, more than a little ashamed of what she was about to say. "Sometimes I wish I'd never met Dean Winchester. I'm so, _so _frakking tired of all these Powers only caring about the fact that I knew him."

"Biblically speaking."

"Biblically speaking," she agreed. "I mean, I'm a freaking Vampire Slayer, Wes. I thought that _meant_ something. Or maybe it only does when you're all Buffy Prophecy Girl or whatever. So, yeah, I kinda hate him sometimes. But then I kinda hate everyone sometimes - including myself. Mostly, I just wish it would all stop."

"I am sorry that I can't help you."

The Slayer busied herself with tugging her sleeves and jeans back into place. To her credit, she only winced twice as fabric scraped against the open cuts. "You're here, and you're not a memory, and you don't hate me," she said brusquely. "That's enough. You don't hate me, right?"

"No, Faith, I don't hate you."

"Good." She sniffed and wiped again at her nose. "I don't hate you either."

"Despite the near-constant stream of verbal and physical abuse, I had rather gathered that. Faith . . ."

"Yeah?" The Slayer looked back at him.

"You should know that I also did things in Los Angeles." He regarded her steadily. "Things I'm not proud of. Things I regret. Things I would do over if I had the chance." The Englishman went on, "You don't own a monopoly on wanting redemption."

Faith snorted wetly. "Terrible thing is, Wes, I don't think I even want redemption anymore. Just an ending. Like, didn't you hear me?" she joked, sardonic. "I want to _die_."

"Fair enough," Wesley agreed. His eyes were gentle with sympathy. And for once, sympathy didn't make Faith want to punch his lights out. "But perhaps you can turn your ingenuity to suicide another day? You've rather frightened Jo and Charlie."

Her mouth twisted into a frown. "We're stuck here for eternity. Psycho Slayer had to come out at some point."

"I wouldn't go so far as to call this 'psycho.' And I should know," he added, making one last reference to ancient history.

"Maybe. But you know, I don't think I'm doing any real changing. I'm just drowning."

Standing, the Watcher tucked the demon-killing knife into his belt and offered her a hand. Faith eyed him for a long moment, then accepted it. Wesley helped the Slayer up to her feet and pulled her into an uncharacteristic hug.

The Slayer froze instantly, her shoulders rigid,, her arms dangling limp at her sides. "What are you doing?"

"I don't have any metaphysical life preservers at the moment, so I'm afraid this is the best I can do."

"You also don't have any good jokes, Britbox." Faith put her arms around the man and squeezed back gingerly.

"For whatever it's worth, I am glad that you are here," Wesley told the top of her head before releasing her. "And just think of all the chaos that we can cause now that you know how to find Naomi."

"I don't have the exact details on her office, but it's probably close to the Garden. Maybe Ash and I could go looking for it tonight. It would be nice to take a sh-t on her desk," Faith said wistfully.

"Attagirl. Once more into the breach?" proposed Wesley with one hand on the door.

"Henry V," Faith answered automatically, recognizing the reference from another of the nerds' backroom theater nights.

"That's the spirit. See? You _are _changing."

"Thou art a boil," the Slayer retorted with the one Shakespearean insult she could remember from Charlie's endless list. "A plague sore. An embossed carbuncle. But, uh, thanks for the pep talk."

"Anytime. Well, most times. You have leaves in your hair, by the way."

"Sounds about right." Brushing at the back of her head. Faith sighed in resignation. "I still want to die, you know." She leaned over to retrieve her angel sword and tucked it back through one of her belt loops. "But I guess I won't be doing any dying today."


	13. Jailbreak, pt 1

**A/N:** Shout out to Astra Across the Stars!

* * *

**February 27, 2020, Harvelle's Roadhouse, the Axis Mundi, Heaven **

Wesley blocked the fist headed his way with the back of his forearm and dodged to the left. Not quite in time, for the Slayer's second blow still caught him solidly in the ribs and half-knocked the wind out of him.

Panting, he backed away two steps. "Not bad," he commented after he had caught his breath.

Faith assessed his stance with the cool eye of a professional. They had been sparring in the cleared backroom of the Roadhouse for the last half hour, and she was tired of her former Watcher holding back. "Stop going easy on me, Wesley," she warned.

"I'm not going easy on you," he protested, lifting the bottom of his t-shirt to wipe some of the sweat from his face.

"Well, you certainly ain't going hard," retorted the Slayer. "Looks like you're getting a little pudgy there, princess," she taunted.

Wesley dropped the hem of his shirt self-consciously and took a swig from a half-empty water bottle sitting on the bar-top. "You treat Jo and Charlie like this?" he asked. He already knew the answer. "You get after them? Push them? Start yelling when they don't do what you want them to do - when anyone fails to do what you want them to do?"

"This's supposed to be training, Wes," Faith said innocently with a touch of mock-indignation. "I'm just asking you to do your job as a Watcher and try to take me down."

"Nuh uh." The Englishman shook his head and screwed the cap back on the water bottle. "That's not what you're after. You want me to hurt you."

The indignation grew. "Are you questioning my honesty?"

Wesley rolled his eyes. "For Heaven's sake, Faith. I _know_ you. I know what truth and lies sound like when they come rolling out of your mouth."

While not quite admitting that he was right, the Slayer abandoned her pretenses. "Then know this - you'd better get to hitting me, Wes. 'Cause if you don't hurt me, I'm gonna have to hurt you. And neither of us wants that." Faith flashed him a toothy smile.

"You do realize that you are being supremely annoying," Wesley pointed out in exasperation. Lehane was at least forty percent full of hot air, but his ribs were still twinging, and he saw no utility in continuing to provoke her. Returning to the worn patch of flooring opposite the Slayer, he brought his fists up into a guard position.

Mirroring his stance, she sing-songed, "It takes one to know one."

"Oh, for the love of G-d," the former Watcher exhaled. Giving in to his irritation, he hauled back and punched the woman in the face, dead on the bridge of her nose.

"Good," Faith grinned as blood trailed red and coppery down from her nostrils and into her mouth. "Now you're getting it."

There was only one response that Wesley could have to that. With another sigh, he slammed his other fist directly into her solar plexus and drove all the air out of her lungs. It wiped that damn grin off of her face. "There. Are you happy?"

Faith wiped a dirty sleeve against her gushing nose and smiled again. Her teeth were streaked a disturbing shade of pink, the edges outlined with a darker red. "Getting there."

* * *

**March 11, 2020, Harvelle's Roadhouse, the Axis Mundi, Heaven**

"Well, it's official." Ash pushed his stool back away from the bar counter and shut his laptop with a heavy thud. "I need a beer."

Jo looked up from sharpening the already lethally-edged machete resting against her leg. "Why is you needing a beer official?" she teased good-naturedly.

"No, not that. They've decided it's a pandemic."

There was no need for anyone to ask who _they_ or what _it _was. Ash and Charlie had been stalking the progress of the new coronavirus across the globe for weeks now.

"They certainly took their time about it," Wesley commented from behind the bar, where he was brewing a pot of Earl Grey to make a round of London Fogs for the room.

"It's crazy," Charlie said excitedly. She was watching some type of news conference from her own computer. "No one in the U.S. is really doing _anything_!"

"Pestilence rides again," Faith muttered under her breath. She flipped hte page in a borrowed copy of _Good Omens_, wondering why on earth she seemed to have a soft spot for demons named Crowley. Although, to be fair, the literary one seemed much less of a douchebag than the one who had, on various occasions, orchestrated her kidnapping, nearly overdosed her on Orpheus, and tried to choke her to death.

Annoyed, she thought, _Why do they always go for the Force-choke?_ and turned the next page.

* * *

**June 1, 2020, Harvelle's Roadhouse, the Axis Mundi, Heaven**

Charlie turned away from her laptop, her face grey and pale with fatigue. "So there's protests now," she announced gravely. "And they're spreading."

Partway through the semi-monthly ritual of re-drawing the Roadhouse's protective sigils in a mixture of human blood and holy oil, Wesley paused, his index finger oozing where it pressed against the wall. "What happened?"

"You'll have to come here and see for yourself." The redhead was completely drained. "I can't stand to read it again. Very short version: police brutality and systemic racism. World's racing to Hell in a handbasket."

"I think it's been there for a while," Jo commiserated. She was following behind Wesley and spraying the sigils with a polyurethane spray to keep them in place. "Hey, Faith - want to go patrolling tonight?"

"Hmm?" Faith stuck her finger in Wesley's battered secondary school edition of _Othello _and glanced up. She nodded in approval at the others' progress. "Your boy Billy was one dirty bird," she commented to Wesley. "And, uh, thanks for the offer, Jo, but I'm good. You all can go patrol by yourselves."

* * *

**September 12th, Somewhere near Dayton, Ohio, Alternate Universe**

A question had been rattling around in the back of Dean's mind for a while now. Heck, nearly since the moment the Rift had opened and they had run into new-Bobby, way back before Jack's birth. It had been the kind of thought that sprang to life in a split second and wouldn't die, no matter how he refused to feed it.

Now, all these months after, it was probably far too late, but he had to know. So he waited until everyone else was busy and cornered Bobby outside one of the rebel settlement's few remaining buildings.

"Hey, Bobby."

"Dean," the older man greeted him gruffly.

"You need help with anything?"

"No, I'm good." The hunter eyed him sidelong. "There something I can help _you_ with?"

Just like his own version, not much got past this world's Bobby Singer. "I, uh, got a question for you."

"Shoot."

Dean lowered his voice. He did not want anybody to catch wind of his next question. Not Sam, not his mother, not Jack, not Ketch, and certainly not Lucifer. None of them were within earshot at the moment, but Dean had had enough of taking chances. "Have you, uh, have you heard anything about Vampire Slayers?"

Bobby spat out his gum. "Vampire Slayers, huh?" Nudging at the earth with the toe of his boot, he kicked a small pile of dirt over the gum. "What fool kinda stories you been listening to wherever the hell it is that you come from?"

Resisting the urge to slump his shoulders, Dean concurred, "So you don't know anything about Vampire Slayers."

"Didn't say that. I know plenty 'bout Vampire Slayers. But they died out, boy. Fifty years ago."

Hope sprang anew. "So if I wanted to look up a person who was a . . ."

"There ain't no way to look people up, son. We ain't got access to the Yellow Pages out here. This ain't your fancy-pants universe. This is -" Bobby paused at the look of clear disappointment on Dean's face. "Who're you looking for?" he asked, more kindly. "I may have heard something, and if I haven't, I can maybe ask around."

"I'm looking for a woman named Faith Lehane," said Dean stiffly, feeling a twinge of guilt that he forcefully brushed away.

It wasn't a betrayal, looking to see if her alternate universe doppleganger had made it. It wouldn't be the same Faith. He knew that. Just like this world's Charlie wasn't his and Sam's Charlie, and this Bobby wasn't his Bobby. Dean understood that this world's Slayer would be an entirely different person. He did. Swear to G-d, he really did. But still . . . he had to know.

"Name doesn't ring any bells. You got any other identifying information?"

"Born in the South End of Boston, 1980 or, uh, maybe 1981."

"I'll do what I can," said the older man skeptically. "But I don't want you to go expecting anything to come out of this, you hear me? Like I said, Vampire Slayers been extinct for at least the last fifty years. If this friend of yours was supposed to be a Slayer, chances are she led the kind of life that would've gotten her dead without access to Slayer powers. You understand?"

Dean understood. After all, his Slayer's life had gotten her dead even with hot-girl super powers. "I got it. Thanks, Bobby."

"Mmhmm." The older man stuck his hands into his pockets. "I'm guessing you're wanting to keep this between you an' me, huh?"

"I'd appreciate it."

"Mmph." Bobby gave him an extended dead-eyed stare, one that hinted at half a dozen unasked questions. "I'm sorry about your brother," he said after a while.

"He's okay now," Dean replied, looking along the line of angel resistance fighters to the wooden bench where his mother and Sam were sitting together eating something hot, steaming, and best not to name out of paper bowls.

"You think we can trust this Lucifer?" asked Bobby. He jerked his head towards the archangel in question, who was deep in discussion with his son.

Jack glanced up, as if he was sensing their gaze, and smiled awkwardly at Dean.

"Of course not," grumbled Dean, but he faked a smile and nodded back at Jack. "First chance he gets, he's gonna screw us seven ways to Sunday."

"Right. You figure out a way yet to screw him first?"

"No," came the terse response. "Not just yet. But I'm workin' on it."

* * *

**September 13, 2020, Harvelle's Roadhouse, the Axis Mundi, Heaven**

"Wesley?"

"Hmm?" Gladly abandoning a strange treatise on angel and human relations that he had acquired from Bobby Singer and that read like a stuffy academic's attempt at poorly written erotica, Wesley swung his legs down from the table onto the floor. "Yes, what is it, Charlie?"

The computer hacker plopped into the seat opposite him. Her expressive eyes were even wider than usual, and her face was creased with worry. "Jo and I were talking." She nodded her head towards the blonde hunter, who was taking her turn at washing dishes. "Do you know - that is - I mean - when's the last time any of us saw Faith around here? For longer than the five minutes it takes her to grab a new case of beer, borrow more of my books, and stock up on frozen pizzas?"

"I believe it has been a few weeks," the man admitted.

"It's been six weeks," Charlie corrected him. "_Six_. We're worried that something's wrong with her."

"There are many things wrong with her," replied Wesley, trying to think ahead of whatever questions Charlie might ask him. "For starters, she's dead."

"That's not funny, Wesley." Jo rounded the corner of the bar.

Wesley silently disagreed. It _had_ been funny.

"She's never acted like this before," continued Charlie. "Do you have any idea why she's being different?"

"I am sure I could posit a few theories," said Wesley smoothly. "But that is all that they would be - theories."

"She isn't even patrolling with us any more," the redhead pointed out.

"I know."

"What happened to taking down the angels?" Jo demanded, her voice harsh with frustration. "She sold us on this plan of rebellion and changing things and making a difference. And now half the time she's campaigning against you and Charlie for bookworm of the year, and the rest of the time, she's disappeared into her own Heaven. What the hell happened?"

Wesley eyed the badly written erotica in front of him. Queasy as it made him, reading that drivel was beginning to seem more attractive than participating in this conversation. "Unfortunately, I suspect that eternity happened."

Charlie persisted, "Can't you do something?"

"I cannot defeat eternity."

"You're useless." Jo threw her hands up. "So you and she're abandoning it all to me and Ash and Charlie, then, huh?"

"I didn't say that I was abandoning anything," Wesley corrected her. He reached for the treatise. "I am quite content to continue our arrangement. But if Faith is no longer interested, I fear there is nothing I can do about it."

* * *

Despite his protestations of neutrality to the others, on his way home that evening, Wesley made an uncharacteristic detour along the Axis Mundi.

Alirael's key ring weighed heavily in his pocket as he followed a series of backdoors, alleyways, and shortcuts, finally slipping into the angel pathways outside of the 'Le-'s. Wesley walked carefully along the hallway, peering at the names inscribed on the doors until he came to the one he sought.

He sorted through the key ring, thumbing through keys of silver and copper and gold. Eventually, he found the right one.

Wesley twisted the key in the lock and knocked twice before shouldering the door open and stepping into a fantastically filthy apartment that could only have been inhabited by teenagers.

A lanky blond with a faceful of acne was kneeling beside a broken-down couch across from an ancient television, a single rose in his hand, professing his undying love to the woman sprawled out across the couch.

"Wes." The Slayer startled into a sitting position as the door opened, dropping the book into her lap. It slid off her bare legs and over the side of the couch, landing with a soft thump atop a pile of other dog-eared paperbacks.

The Englishman tutted. He barely resisted the impulse to straighten out the books. Letting them pile up like that was almost criminal. "If Charlie knew that this was how you were treating her Pratchett . . ."

A dagger appeared from out of thin air into Faith's hands. "Which is why she'll never find out, right?" she teased.

"Right," Wesley replied slowly. He did some quick mental calculations. The Watcher was about sixty-three percent sure that Faith would not stab him if he attempted to organized her Pratchett pile. Well, maybe sixty-two percent sure . . .

He paused, then cleared his throat. "The others are, uh, concerned about you. No one's seen you in a while."

"I'm not finished with the Pratchett yet," Faith said dismissively with a wave of her knife-wielding hand. "And I haven't run out of beer. I'll pop in when I'm done."

Wesley raised his eyes to the ceiling. "They are also, er, concerned about your lack of interest in our, uh, previous venture," he addressed a spot of black mold.

"I'm reading about Sam Vimes. The angels can wait."

Continuing to address the spot of mold, the man went on, "The radio is full of concern about further attrition in Heaven. Lucifer has vanished from this dimension. I find that reassuring, frankly, but the angels do not seem so convinced. The, er, Naphil has also gone missing from this dimension."

Faith's eyes narrowed. "I know what you're doing," she observed. "You want to get me involved with a little community project again. Well, you can forget it, man. We can't do jacksh-t up here. So I'm out."

"Except for when someone took an actual sh-t in Naomi's super-secret headquarters," Wesley reminded the ceiling.

"Yeah." The Slayer's face softened as she smiled at the memory. "That was fun. But I ain't doing that anymore. If I can't get out of the game, I can at least quit playing."

"Faith . . ." Wesley hesitated, then added the last bit of news that Charlie had whispered in his ear before he left the Roadhouse that night. He looked away from the black mold and met her gaze. "It's not just Lucifer and his son who have vanished from this dimension. Charlie isn't able to track the Winchesters anymore, either."

The Slayer's expression grew hard. "I thought we agreed not to track the Winchesters," she said in a voice so cold he was surprised that her words didn't instantly form icicles in mid-air.

"Charlie's concerned about them. So is Jo. And Ash. They like to keep an eye out, from time to time," admitted the Englishman uncomfortably.

"Get out, Wes."

"What? Faith, this wasn't my idea."

Faith dropped her knife onto the couch cushion beside her and reached for her book again. "Out," she repeated herself.

"Come now -"

Without looking up, the Slayer cut him off. "You'd better skedaddle, buckaroo. I'm done talking, and it's time for Vimes to read 'Where's My Cow?'" She added, as an aside, "I could write a similar book about you all - only it'd be titled 'Where's Your G-ddammed Sense?'"

Admitting defeat, Wesley decided that discretion was the better part of valor, followed her advice, and skedaddled before the Slayer could do anything too creative with her knife.

On the whole, he supposed, that little visit could have gone far worse.

* * *

Faith waited for the furious ringing in her ears to dissipate, waited for Steve to resume his love speech for the ten thousandth time, waited until she was absolutely sure that Wesley was not going to return with some clever quip that he had thought of on his way out.

When five minutes had passed, she kicked her legs over the side of the couch and walked past her teenage klepto boyfriend. Day after day, he continued to profess his love, and day after day, she continued to ignore him. If she had not had more pressing concerns, it would have been frakking depressing.

The Slayer ducked into the single bedroom and jerked back a curtain dividing the room in two to reveal a giant blank whiteboard. She walked slowly around the edge of the whiteboard to the other side, where a stampede of cramped writing was scribbled all the way from left to right and top to bottom.

Faith lifted a red marker from the tray below the white-board and stared at a web diagram that would have made any self-respecting monster arachnid quiver in terror at its sheer disorganization. The content of the web would have made many a self-respecting monster arachnid hunter quiver in terror at its implications.

Frowning, she crossed a few of the smaller bubbles off of the board, bubbles that contained a single name each. Then she bit her lip, thinking. All the bubbles had now been crossed out but one.

Ah, well. She had suspected it might come to this, sooner or later.

Reaching into a cardboard box at her feet, Faith drew out an ancient-looking book wrapped in calf-colored leather. She turned the pages with ginger care, grimacing slightly as her fingers touched the parchment.

It had been only just short of hell, finding this book. It had taken months of stealing Alirael's key ring when Wesley wasn't looking, slipping in and out of elderly monks' Heavens, and asking Charlie questions about her experiences helping the Brothers Winchester without letting the redhead in on her true objective.

As Faith flicked through the book, her mouth twisted in distaste. She always hated when authors decided to add extra grimness to their grimoires by writing only on human skin.

It made sense enough, she supposed. You couldn't use pretty princess unicorn sparkle stationery for something like this. Wouldn't have quite the same degree of creepy gravitas.

And you sure as hell needed creepy gravitas to write something like the one she was currently holding. Creepy gravitas, an abundance of talent, and sheer psychosis to write something like this, the Book of the Damned.

* * *

**September 14th, 2020, Somewhere near Dayton, Ohio**

"I got the answer that you were looking for," Bobby said out of the corner of his mouth.

It had been nearly two days, and in the sheer disaster tornado of trying to get everyone ready for departure towards the Rift, Dean had almost forgotten what his question had been. Almost, but not quite.

"What do ya got for me?" he asked, dropping his voice into just above a whisper.

Bobby's face settled even deeper into its already heavy lines. "Your girl's dead," he told Dean brusquely, without preamble. "Died ten years back when the angels decided to cleanse the prison systems. She was doing a dime for grand larceny and, uh," he frowned, "solicitation of prostitution. Angels fire-bombed the place. No survivors."

"I thought it would be something like that," replied Dean as a leaden weight took up residence behind his collarbone and started aching. "Thanks for looking into it for me, Bobby."

"Mmph," the older man acknowledged the gratitude with a nod. "Wish I could've had better news for ya."

"She was a good woman," Dean said under his breath, for a moment speaking only to himself and not the other hunter. "When she had the chance to be."

He allowed himself to stew for another few seconds, and then straightened up. "Okay, Bobby." His voice was only a little shaky. "What's next?"

* * *

**September 20th, 2020, Harvelle's Roadhouse, the Axis Mundi, Heaven **

When she finally exhausted her supply of six-packs, frozen burritos, and Discworld novels, Faith threw a few essential sharp and pointy objects into her backpack, loaded up all of Charlie's books that she needed to return, and set out for the Roadhouse. She was not particularly quiet when she arrived, having already decided that it was best to deal with whatever confrontation awaited her right out of the gate.

The screen door swung closed behind her with a loud thunk as it hit the frame, but instead of the angry greeting that she had expected, there was nothing. Not even the proverbial crickets.

Faith tracked the silence into the back room. Her four fellow co-conspirators were all huddled around the giant network of laptop computers that Ash and Charlie had built. None of them looked up as she approached.

Bad form, thought the Slayer. After all, she could have been something nasty. Well - _nastier_. She cleared her throat loudly. "Hi, gang."

Charlie was the first one to jerk out of her seat, springing up and twisting around. "Faith! What are you, uh . . . how've you been?"

The badly-managed question set Faith's teeth on edge, and she crossed her arms over her stomach. "What's going on?"

"I don't think you want to see this," the redhead hedged.

"See what?" demanded Faith.

Wesley turned away from the computers. His face was filled with resignation. "Come here, Faith. You need to see this."

"What is it?" the Slayer asked again peevishly. She joined their semi-circle around the sprawled tangle of electronics. Surveying the others quickly, she noted that Charlie's nails had been bitten down to the quick and Jo's lips were uncharacteristically pursed. Ash gave off an aura of having pulled three all-nighters in a row, but that could just be his usual levels of sleep deprivation.

"Rewind the tapes." Wesley told the nerds firmly. "Faith needs to see this."

Faith watched as the MIT dropout pulled up a security camera feed. With a sinking feeling, she recognized the tall ceilings and wide hallways as the Winchesters' underground lair in Lebanon.

"What are you doing?" she hissed. She dug her fingernails into the meat of Wesley's forearm. "I _told_ you not to monitor them."

"_Watch_," Wesley insisted, pulling her nails out of his skin with his free hand before she could break the skin.

Faith's jaw clenched and unclenched rhythmically as Ash turned up the volume. She recognized two of the small figures on the screen. That - that was Castiel. And next to him, bowlegged and irascible as ever, was Dean Winchester. They were talking to a tall man with dark skin whose expression was so full of arrogance that Faith instantly recognized him as some kind of Power that Was.

"This is the end," the Power was saying in a harsh, proud voice, "of everything."

"No," said Dean Winchester.

"Who is that?" Feeling vaguely nauseated, Faith gestured to the screen. "The new guy. The one who was just talking."

"Michael," Charlie replied anxiously. "I think it's the one from the universe that the Naphil opened. It's a bit hard to follow, but - "

But then Dean Winchester said something that was not at all hard to follow.

"What if . . . What if you had your sword?"

"Dean, no!" cried out Castiel, his voice thin and tinny from whatever audio feed Charlie had tapped into.

There was more conversation, an argument back and forth between Dean and his feathered not-quite-boyfriend, while this new-universe Michael looked on, regarding Dean like a piece of meat. Faith heard their words, but none of it registered. Her ears were ringing, and bile burned in her throat.

Light flashed, glaringly bright, whiting out the camera. When it cleared, Castiel was left alone in the bunker, shock and horror on his face.

That horror was reflected in the faces of the four people around her. As Ash paused the recording, Faith slowly began to realize that they had all watched this already and were replaying it solely for her benefit.

"That _idiot_," said the Slayer when she had recovered coherent thought. Her hands were curled into fists. "That _god-damned idiot._ I am going to _kill _him."

There was utter silence. The others watched her, breathless. If they were waiting for an explosion, Faith thought hysterically, they wouldn't have to wait much longer.

She stared at the frozen Castiel on the screen, swallowed, and then went on. "How long ago was this?" she asked, her voice trembling from strain.

"Roughly three days ago, judging by the time stamp," Ash answered quickly.

_Three days!_ "And do we, uh, have anything else?" wondered the Slayer. Her mouth was parched dryer than the Sahara.

Ash moved the cursor on the video, and Castiel paced around the bunker at octuple speed. "This happened about thirty minutes after that."

The angel's phone rang, and Castiel answered it instantly.

"Sam?" he said, and Faith thought she had never heard the angel sound so scared. "Are you all right? Is - is Dean with you?"

Castiel listened to the response on the other end of the line, and his face crumpled. "I - I see," he said again after what felt like half of an eternity. "Do you have any idea where Michael went?"

It was the confirmation Faith had been waiting for. "G-d_damnit_," she breathed.

Wesley's hand was suddenly on her arm, the air warm with the feel of him, far too close, his touch on her skin hot and heavy and dragging her down, down, down from the cloud of disbelief that had swamped her.

"You can't trust archangels," Charlie said in a mournful voice.

"Holy sh-t," breathed Jo. "I can't - I still can't believe he actually said yes. Faith, are you . . . okay?"

Once upon a time, Faith would have had an easy answer to that question. Forever and a half ago, when her heart had beat with _real _blood and not just the memory of it, she would not have even had to think.

But that was a different time. A time when all she possessed in spades was a combination of overconfidence, desperation, and being too dumb to lay down and die. That plus a selective tendency towards acting as what the youths on the earth-television were calling a "ride or die bitch" for the few people who seemed to truly give a damn about her. First had been her first Watcher, Diana. Then along came the Mayor. Then Angel, and then Winchester Junior Sized, and then a few of the younger Slayers. But now . . . only the desperation was left.

Her first clear thought came hot and hard. _Team Humanity just lost its star forward. And their acting commander just lost his brother. Thing One and Thing Two are gonna need help. _

The second thought followed almost immediately after, soft, sibilant doubt slipping in between the ringing in her ears. While she might not have been following events on Earth with the fervent devotion of Ash and Charlie, she had picked up enough. _Castiel looks motivated. He won't leave a stone unturned when it comes to rescuing Dean,_ her doubt reminded her. _And Thing Two knows how to get all the help he needs, if he just picks up the phone._

The third thought was dispassionate, stating a simple fact. _You can _use _this. It's time for the book._

"Faith?" A voice cut through her ruminations. Wesley. Stolid, smart, loyal, doomed Wesley.

"That's it." The Slayer uncrossed her arms and tugged herself loose from his hand at her elbow. All the blood had rushed out of her fingers, and they tingled as feeling slowly began to return. "I'm done."

"Faith -" started Jo, uncertain and concerned. Faith had never heard the blonde so unsure of herself before.

Then again, Faith had never felt this angry before.

"I'm done," she repeated herself. She called to mind a page from the Book of the Damned, one she had stared at over and over until the arcane symbols had stamped themselves onto her brain. "I'm breaking out of here - _now_."

"How?" asked Charlie nervously.

Wesley made to grab her arm again. "Hold on-"

Dodging him easily, the Slayer's face twisted into a rictus like a death mask. "Don't worry, Wes. I've been learning some things."

While the others stared at her in confusion, Faith took out a slender silver knife from the variety of sharp stabby things in her pockets. Before anyone could stop her, she drew the knife across her palm once and clenched her fist until a small puddle of blood had dripped down onto the table beside her.

Tracing her right index finger through the blood, the Slayer drew an oddly-angled L with two smaller swipes along its inner curve. If she squinted at it with the proper artistic frame of mind, it resembled something like a club. Close enough.

Charlie whimpered. "Faith, what are you doing?"

Not bothering to answer, Faith lowered her bleeding palm onto the table and began the incantation. She swore furiously in a mixture of ancient Sumerian, Enochian, Latin, and something Wesley was pretty sure was either pidgin orkish or an even less-known Hell dialect.

The Slayer's voice rose in volume as she came to the end of her chant, while the others watched, transfixed in horror. Then Faith ripped her silver knife across her own throat in a single, final gesture. Arterial blood sprayed over the table, but somehow the Slayer remained standing.

Light poured into the room, whiter than any light that any of them had ever seen or imagined, and a sound like the roaring of ten thousand lions mating with ten thousand thunderstorms filled the air.

And then it was over. The room was quiet and dark. All the lightbulbs had blown out. Standing in the center of the room was a woman in a black dress that draped loosely around her, leaving her arms and neck bare. Her wavy brown hair blew back in a nonexistent wind. On her chest was an exact match of the symbol that Faith had drawn on the table.

Everyone had fallen to the floor, their ears ringing, their eyes blurry. Blood dripped from ears, noses, and mouths. Charlie groaned feebly. Ash was curled into a ball, and Jo was shaking on her knees. Wesley had gone whiter than a sheet. What the hell had the Slayer done?

Faith swayed on her feet. The gaping wound in her throat slowly began knitting itself back together. It took more than a silver knife to kill a soul in Heaven, a fact which both the Slayer well knew.

"Hey, girlfriend." The knife fell from Faith's blood-stained hand as she addressed the oldest entity in all of creation. "We need to talk."


	14. Jailbreak, pt 2

**A/N:** I'm so sorry for the delay! Moved states, started a new residency program . . . Anyway, hopefully we should be back to weekly updates from now on.

* * *

**September 20th, 2020, Harvelle's Roadhouse, the Axis Mundi, Heaven, 1729 Angel Standard Time**

The apparition's eyes flickered around the room, noting the four humans crouched on the ground and the one human on her feet, drenched in blood. "I remember you," she said with a mild frown. "Faith Lehane."

"Amara," Faith replied evenly.

From somewhere on the floor behind her, Charlie whimpered. Her wide eyes were locked on the blood-red symbol on Amara's chest. "That's the . . . the mark of Cain," she whisper-shouted, ears still ringing and deaf to her own volume.

Amara's lips twisted with displeasure. "It is _my_ mark," she corrected. A spectral wind blew her wavy brown hair away from her face.

Charlie whimpered again.

"We've got nachos," Faith continued, blissfully unaware of everyone around her looking as if the earth had dropped out from under their feet and the sky had come plummeting down to crush them into smithereens. She had no idea that several code browns had only been narrowly avoided. "And like an endless supply of frozen burritos. You ever try frozen burritos?"

"I prefer fresh."

"As do we all. Sadly, we're fresh out." The Slayer snickered at her own joke. No one else in the room could breathe.

"Why have you summoned me here?" asked the sister of God. Although she continued to frown, her curiosity was piqued. "You are lucky I was not in the middle of a project, or . . . "

Faith waved a hand. "Or fire and brimstone. I get it." She scratched at the drying blood on her throat. "I wouldn't've called, but I need your help. And I think you need mine."

"Do I?" Amara raised her eyebrows but for some unknown reason did not instantly incinerate the insolent fool before her. "I am the most powerful being in this universe or any other. What could you possibly help me with?"

The Slayer took a deep breath, then stepped forwards, hands purposefully remaining at her sides. If Amara decided to blast her or eat her soul, well, there was nothing Faith could do to stop that. She lowered her voice so that the other humans had to strain to listen.

"Because," said the woman lightly, "if you want the chance to ever fulfill that dream you've had of being one with Dean Winchester, you're gonna need me, gorgeous. The Brothers Winchester are up sh-t's creek. And you an' me, we'er gonna be the paddle that gets them out."

Thankfully, Amara chose to respond with amusement rather than offense. "I'm listening."

"Good." Faith finally turned to look at her friends. "Give us the room," she commanded, not requested, because she had heard the baller people on the West Wing say it.

"But -" protested Ash and Charlie together.

The Slayer cut them off with a single, sharp shake of her head.

"Faith -" Jo started, but she got to her feet and began edging towards the door.

Wesley stood at her back for a moment, squeezed her elbow, and murmured, "Be careful." Then he, too, left.

Amara watched them go with an inscrutable expression. Once the door had swung shut behind the last of the humans, she pulled one of the chairs away from the conglomeration of computers and sat. She gestured for Faith to do the same.

"I think," she began as Faith lowered herself into a chair, one hand at the still-healing gash in her neck, "that you had better start by giving me more information."

* * *

**September 21st, 2020, the Bunker, Lebanon, Kansas, 12:18 pm Central Standard Time**

For better or worse, it took Sam nearly a week to stop panicking and start getting his sh-t together. Or that is how Dean would have phrased it. No one currently in the Bunker would have dared.

As it was, everyone around Sam - from Castiel to Mary, Bobby to Jack - was treating him with kid gloves. Sam was doing his best - he really was. Barely sleeping, spending sixteen-plus hours every day on the phones or stalking the internet, doing research on any kind of locating spells that he could think of. Maybe it was the exhaustion, the fatigue, the never-ending fear and grief and the weight heavy as lead on his chest, but a good four days went past before he remembered the Vampire Slayers.

And the instant he did, he could hear his older brother's grumbling in his head, complaining about how foolish he had been and how four days was entirely too long.

_Shut up, Dean_, he wished he could have responded. _I remembered, alright? And isn't that the important thing?_

His stomach grumbled immediately after, but unlike the imagined griping of his brother, Sam could actually do something about his hunger. He scuttled off to the kitchen. Along the way, he tried to avoid the heavily sympathetic glances and pats on his shoulder from everyone he passed with only middling success.

In the kitchen, surrounded by the calming white tile, Sam made himself eat a ham sandwich and drink two full glasses of water before beginning the hefty process of involving Vampire Slayers in his affairs.

He first sent a couple of texts to his two favorite living Slayers - Lily and Becka. To stave off two sets of inevitable outrage, he made the message a group chat and presaged his bad news with, "Please don't jump down my throat about this. It's been a terrible few days."

For once, the girls listened to him and responded with sympathetic emojis. After their initial rounds of horrified dismay, they encouraged him to call Buffy sooner rather than later.

Sam dialed the familiar number, hoping that he wasn't catching anyone at a bad time.

"Hello?" answered a perky voice. He only knew one person who sounded like sunlight personified.

"Hi, Buffy," Sam greeted her morosely.

"Sam." Recognizing that something was off, the blonde Slayer continued with mild apprehension. "How've you been?"

"Not good." Sam sucked his teeth. "Something's, uh, happened."

Buffy exhaled into the phone. "Hasn't it always?" she queried rhetorically. "I swear, it wouldn't kill you and your brother to call every now and then with good news, like, oh, I don't know, videos of baby pandas eating bamboo?"

"I'm sorry."

"It's fine." Buffy sighed. "I've had two weeks of beach vacay since the last apocalypse, so it was probably about crisis time anyway. Go on. What earth-destroying thing is happening in Winchester-land?"

Much later, after he had explained everything to Buffy - everything that had happened and everything that he needed and everything that he was hoping for - and she had promised to put a good chunk her people on it, Sam made another call.

"Hi, Bigfoot," chuckled an unmistakeable Cockney accent into his ear. "You callin' 'bout your lost brother?"

Sam exhaled. He needed more than a sandwich to deal with this. Tapping into Dean's not-so-secret secret stash of whiskey was growing more and more appealing by the minute. "Hi Spike. Lily talk to you already?"

"Yepp." The vampire popped his 'p' obnoxiously. "You lookin' for Illyria?"

"How did you - " Sam cut himself off. There was only one answer to that question. He had told Lily and Becka first as a courtesy. Also to save himself from the tongue lashing that he would get if he had left them out of the loop on something as critical as their current situation. He really ought to have known that they would have taken it as an opportunity to seize all the initiative under the sun. "Lily again?"

"Hole in one."

* * *

**September 20th, 2020, Harvelle's Roadhouse, the Axis Mundi, Heaven, 1809 Angel Standard Time**

After a long discussion over three plates of nachos, two frozen burritos, and a hastily-made pitcher of margaritas, Amara crossed one knee over the other. She reclined as far backwards as the splintery wooden chair would allow her and asked, "So remind me why it is again that you're offering this?"

Leaning back in her own chair, the Slayer shrugged her shoulders. "I don't much care who rules this podunk universe," said Faith with what might in another world have been a smile. "I'd be happy tearing it all down – but there's a good few billions of people who don't have a clue what's going on here and who didn't do a thing to ask for it. I don't think the world necessarily deserves to be destroyed because some ass-hat from another dimension is set on playing Wreck It Ralph.

"That's a movie," she added belatedly when Amara quirked an eyebrow in a silent question. "About a video game. There's a character who, uh, wrecks things."

"As the title would imply."

"Besides," Faith went on, "it's the only way that I can think of. To fix things."

"It almost seems as though saving a whole universe is only incidental to saving one man. Quite the length to go for a boyfriend."

The Slayer gave Amara an acerbic look. "He and I've talked, you know," she pointed out in a tone so dry it could have transmogrified the Amazon into the Sahara, "since the whole Darkness trying to eat the world's souls only to be talked down by a humble drop-out from Kansas thing. And I'm not the one who stopped their whole universal domination and destruction plan when someone batted their pretty green eyes at me. Was it that good, that time you kissed him? I mean, don't get me wrong, he's not a _bad_ kisser, but super-villain-stopping? I dunno about that."

Amara had received enough education from her explorations of the world to understand the majority of the Slayer's unorthodox terminology. "I am not a super-villain," she countered without heat. "If I did not find this amusing, I would -"

"Blow me to smithereens?" Faith leaned forward in her chair. "Don't flirt if you aren't going to follow through."

To this, Amara said nothing.

"That's what I thought." The Slayer eased back in her seat. "Welcome to the Dean Winchester Fan Club, then," she announced with an expansive gesture to the empty room around them. "You can be co-presidents with Castiel. Fair warning, we've never really gotten super organized, so if you want a T-shirt, you're on your own."

"Insolent but persistent." Amara decided to play along for a short while. "If the angel and I are co-presidents, what does that make you?"

"Treasurer," Faith replied automatically. "They're the ones who actually have access to the uh, assets."

"And in this circumstance, the assets would be . . ."

"What do _you_ think?"

The ancient being sitting opposite her _smiled_. It was terrifying. "I think you probably make a very dedicated treasurer."

"I'm good at what I do."

"And yet, I still find myself surprised that you would give the rest of it up."

"Give what up?"

"Your freedom."

Faith shook her head, loose brown hair swinging from side to side. She waved at the warped wooden flooring with its endless beer stains. "Honey," she said, momentarily forgetting who she was speaking to, "this ain't free. And it's boring as hell."

Amara raised her well-groomed eyebrows yet again. "I have been to Hell," she observed mildly. "The demon Crowley attempted to raise me there, provide me with the education he considered important. I did find it to be rather boring."

"You know Crowley?"

"I did." Amara's smile grew less terrifying and more confidential. "Not a fan."

"I enjoyed his style, sometimes," Faith admitted. "When he chose to be smart."

"Yes," Amara considered her for a moment. "I can see that. You seem to put a great stock in style. And like the demon Crowley, you also have a great deal of pride."

"You gotta stand up for yourself, if everyone's kicking you down. No one else is gonna do it for you."

"No one?" wondered Amara with interest.

"Not usually, no."

"I can see that, too." Amara rose to her feet, smoothing the lines of her dress back into place. "I have considered your proposal," she announced in a heavier voice.

Faith scrambled out of her chair. "And?"

"And I am of a mind to accept it. Come here."

Stomach tight with anxiety, Faith crossed the few feet of sticky flooring between them. Barefoot, Amara was the same height as the Slayer in her combat boots, but she still managed to tower over the mortal woman.

"The terms will be as you have laid them out," she said. Some of Faith's anxiety eased. "Any additional assistance will be entirely at my discretion." She frowned. "You will need to be careful of your pride."

"It's all I've got."

"It is not all that you have got."

Faith pressed her lips together tightly and did not reply.

"Very well. Time to seal the bargain." Amara's dark eyes twinkled.

"Is this going to involve more bleeding?" the Slayer asked. "Because I'm already feeling a little light-headed."

"No," Amara smiled. "It must be sealed in the other traditional way."

"Oh, great," was all that Faith had time to mutter, and then Amara's lips were covering hers.

_Ash is going to be so pissed that he missed this,_ she thought as the sister of God kissed her until the Slayer's lungs ran out of air.

Amara stepped back, still smiling. "I'm beginning to see it now," she said at length.

Faith took a long, deep breath. "You're pretty good at that."

"I am more than 'pretty good'. I am all-powerful - at everything. Now, collect your mortal friend. It is time for us to be gone."

"Fina-frakking-lly," the brunette muttered. She slung her tattered backpack up and over her shoulder, then turned towards the door.

With an upraised hand, Amara halted her. "One more thing." Her voice was grave. "Answer me this - and answer it seriously. If Dean Winchester had not gone missing, would you have soon invented a reason to seek me?"

The Slayer met her gaze, disturbingly direct as it was. "Maybe," she hedged.

Amara looked deeply into the human woman's eyes for another long moment. Then, "Be careful," she warned seriously, echoing Wesley's plea from earlier.

Faith kept her chin up. "Of pride?"

"Of that and more." She pressed her palm against the skin of Faith's neck. Her hand glowed faintly, and the dried blood vanished as the skin knitted itself fully together. "There."

"Thank you." She touched the healed wound gingerly. The pain was gone.

Amara laughed. "Don't thank me yet. It is I who will win, even if your schemes go south."

Anxiety came racing back, accompanied by several dollops of nausea. Maybe this had not been the best plan. But it had, Faith thought, been the only plan. Months and months of research had left her with that conclusion. There was no other option.

"Okay," she swallowed down the sumo-wrestler-sized toad in her throat. "Let's do this."

* * *

Her friends were gathered at the main bar, heads together, reeking of worry.

"It's okay, guys," said Faith with more cheer and emphasis than she felt, as she and Amara emerged from the back room. "It's all going to be fine."

Charlie gasped when she saw her. "You're . . ." she paused, and then said in a tremulous voice, "_marked_."

Faith cocked her head to one side quizzically. "Huh?"

_"There_," the redhead pointed up to her forehead.

The Slayer felt up past her eyebrows with her fingertips. She could trace the faint outline of what might, to an artist, have been a representation of a donkey's jawbone. She turned to Amara, the unspoken question writ plain across her face.

"It will fade in time," the sister of God informed her. "After all, I have to amuse myself some way. Now . . ." She looked from Faith to Charlie to Ash to Jo to Wesley and back to Faith again. "You can all put down whatever sharp-edged trifles you are holding close to comfort yourselves."

Rolling her eyes, she added, "I am not going to hurt any of you. But we must now move more quickly, before my brother's angel spawn notice my presence and attempt to infiltrate this place. I believe I can guess, but humor me. Which one of you is Wesley?"

Back ramrod straight, chin level Wesley stepped forward away from the huddle. It would not do to let the side down, after all. "I am Wesley Wyndam-Pryce."

Amara's eyes locked on his. "Yes," she concluded after a moment's examination. "You will do."

With an angry and frightened glance towards Faith, Wesley said curtly, "I suppose I am at your service, madam?"

"No, not at mine," replied Amara with a trace of a mournful air. "Pity. Take my hand."

She held out a slim white hand. Wesley grasped it firmly by the palm.

Without letting go of him, Amara extended her other hand. "Come, Faith. We must be going."

"Sorry, guys," Faith said in a rush, staring at Charlie, Jo, and Ash as if burning their faces onto the back of her retinas. She had not planned this far ahead, had certainly not planned out how to say all the things that she really and truly ought to say. "I'm really sorry. It'll be okay. Trust me. It'll -"

"Faith," Amara repeated herself impatiently.

"Right, sorry." With one last despairing glance at her friends, the Slayer joined hands with the Darkness.

A rush of wind coursed through the room, and they were gone.

* * *

**September 22, 2020, Picadilly Circus, London, United Kingdom, 0030 AM British Summer Time**

"Who was that? On the phone?" Angel was lying comfortably across the entire length of the black leather sofa. It had been an uneventful night thus far, if one discounted the countless telephone calls that Spike had been fielding throughout the evening.

Dean Winchester had been possessed by an archangel from an alternate dimension, and now both archangel and Winchester had vanished. The ensuing general state of panic had consumed the entire American hunting community and a good two-thirds of the younger, more romantic Vampire Slayers.

Still, phone calls were only phone calls, not actual fights with various sharp-fanged, -toothed, -clawed, -tongued, or literally blood-thirsty monsters. And as long as he did not have to leave the flat and nothing exploded, Angel considered a night to be nicely uneventful.

The receiver clanged down in the kitchen, and Spike wandered back in, carrying two mugs of dark crimson liquid. He set one on the coffee table in front of Angel and took the other to the wingback armchair to the left of the sofa. The evil mastermind chair, as Andrew had nicknamed it during his last stay in London.

"Lily again?" asked Angel when the blond vampire did not immediately reply. "Is she still freaking out?"

"Not exactly." Spike stirred his blood with a spoon. There was likely some terrible, unspeakable additive in it. Something like weetabix or gummy bears or - it really did not bear thinking about. He licked the spoon clean. "_That_ was Willow, calling to give us all the same updates that Lily and Samuel passed along earlier today."

"Anything new?"

"She wants to set up a network of magic users to detect any power surges. And then there was something about ley line mapping and celestial energy and . . . "

"And you stopped listening."

"And I stopped listening," Spike agreed. "Anything good on the telly?"

"Not particularly." Angel tossed the remote gently into the other vampire's lap for once instead of chucking it madly at his head. Fred, who had gone to bed early with a headache after Illyria's long consultation with Sam, would have called it progress. "I think they've got reruns of TOWIE on, somewhere."

"Ah, TOWIE's always on." Spike sipped at his mug and flicked through the channels until he located the show in question. "It's rubbish."

"Mmm," concurred Angel.

But that had never stopped either of them from watching it before. And tonight, when Magic Town was blissfully quiet, when whatever mayhem that a rogue archangel could cause had yet to begin, they were free to indulge in their favorite of trashy reality shows - their favorite, that is, except for when Love Island came on.

They had gotten through two and a half episodes when a loud knock sounded heavily at the door. Angel sat bolt upright and exchanged a look of concern with Spike.

"You expecting anyone?" the blond asked.

"No."

"Me neither."

They retrieved swords from the umbrella stand in the front hallway, and Spike ducked into Angel's shadow. "You're the big one," he said by way of explanation. "Age before beauty and all that."

Angel rolled his eyes. He peered through the peephole, but only saw the outlines of leaves and flowers.

This was his fault, the vampire reflected sourly. He hadn't discouraged Fred from purchasing a Michaelmas wreath two whole weeks early and setting it on the front door. Very well. There was nothing else for it.

Sliding the bolt back, he then undid the chain. Sword in hand, Angel eased the door open. He nearly dropped the blade when he saw the trio waiting for him on the other side of the door.

"Hey, lover," said the woman in the front, grinning from ear to ear, a silver symbol glowing on her forehead, her brown eyes shiny with emotion. "I'm home."


	15. Jailbreak, pt 3

**A/N:** Only one day late, which is almost on time, right? ;) Hope you enjoy!

* * *

**September 22, 2020, Picadilly Circus, London, United Kingdom, 0230 AM British Summer Time**

Angel spluttered. Words had utterly deserted him. "You're - " he garbled. "You're - "

Faith shouldered past him into the entryway. "Alive. More or less. For now." She dodged the vampire's arm as he attempted to hug her and smacked him lightly on the back instead. "And I brought a present." She jerked her head behind her at Wesley, who was second in their little party. "Heya, Spike."

The blond vampire raised his sword to block her, as Angel was too busy gaping at a resurrected Wesley to be of any use. "Hello, pet. Care to establish your bona fides?"

"I walked in, didn't I?" Faith gestured to the front door of the flat.

The spacious three-bedroom in Piccadilly Circus had once been acquired as an investment by Rupert Giles using his promotional bonus following Buffy's defeat of the Master. As far as Faith was concerned, that initial bonus should have gone to Buffy and not Giles, but thus had it ever been. Watchers always got the credit - and the money - for the deeds of the Slayer. The flat had been willed to Faith upon Giles' death. His subsequent resurrection into his pre-teenage body had not changed things.

Faith was terribly fond of the place. During the decade or so of her intermittent occupancy, she had spelled and warded every door and window and air vent and water pipe to keep away vampires, angels, demons, ex-hook-ups, and proselyters. The Slayer had even gone so far as to enlist Willow's help expanding the wards until only those accompanied by someone keyed into the spells themselves could enter.

Had Faith not been exactly herself, she would have been frozen in carbonite the instant she stepped across the threshold.

Now that she thought about it, she remembered Andrew also being present the night they expanded the wards. All three of them - Andrew, Faith, and even Willow herself - had been more than a little drunk before they got to the end - that would explain the carbonite.

"So you did," Spike agreed after she passed the threshold test. The blond vampire grinned from ear to ear.

Angel had yet to recover. He was staring at Wesley as though seeing a ghost. Which, Faith figured, fair enough.

"Come on in, folks," she called over her shoulder. Wesley and Amara followed her into the apartment, past a still-shattered Angel and a coolly curious Spike, and down the hallway to the living room.

"Have a seat." Faith gestured to the black leather couch. "There's probably not anything in the fridge with these two around," she gave Angel and Spike a fond, teasing smile, "but I can check."

"Faith." Angel located his vocal cords. "What is going on? What happened? What - "

The Slayer interrupted him. "Answers in due time. Where's Fred?"

"Fred's here?" Wesley spoke for the first time. He was still in shock from the nauseating kaleidoscope nightmare that had been teleportation with Amara.

"Asleep. Why -"

A door in the back hallway creaked. A cloud of light brown hair and a pair of pajamas adorned with fluffy sheep jumping fences poked around the corner into the living room. The face above the sheep was cold and calculating.

"Hey, Bluebird." Faith recognized the expression. It was Wesley's turn to look shattered. The Englishman's mouth parted, and he inhaled sharply.

"The Burkle remains asleep," announced the woman in pajamas stiltedly. Her eyes were darting back and forth between Wesley and Amara as if unsure where to look, sparing little attention for Faith.

That was a-okay with the Slayer, who preferred not to be considered too closely.

"My lady," the ancient demon-king added belatedly.

"Illyria." Amara inclined her head. "Nice PJs."

Illyria blushed hotly. "My lady - " she said again.

"Do you continue to enjoy your _ co-habitation_ with this human?" the sister of God asked, wrinkling her nose. "I mean, I suppose it is - oh what's that human word? Ah, yes. _Cute_."

"I do what I must," frowned Illyria. "It is far from an ideal situation, yet it is the best solution we have found for the present."

She glanced at the two humans and two vampires, all four key enforcers of the various plans that had, from time to time, prevented Illyria from following her own desires and fully burning out the Burkle. She had, alas, grown used to sharing this vessel with the scientist. True, it was annoying, but it was less annoying than spending the rest of her eternity with various furious mud-monkeys and demon hybrids dogging at her tail.

"That was before." Amara's eyes gleamed. She was rather looking forward to this. "This is now."

"My lady?" Illyria repeated herself a third time.

Amara's voice dropped low, into an eldritch whisper. She began chanting in a language too ancient for the others to understand. She brought the fingertips of both hands to her sternum, then drew them away slowly. Streams of bright white, gossamer material spread from her chest to her fingers, and she gradually pulled them out and away from her body. She began to form the streams into a glowing sphere the size of a baseball.

"Are those . . . _souls_?" whispered Faith, who had done her research.

"Don't worry." Amara smiled another of her smiles that set everyone in the room to worrying, _hard_. "I can always get more."

The color of the sphere changed, from shimmering white to a violently cobalt blue. Shards of lightning sprang from Amara's outstretched hands to Illyria's head. Illyria groaned, and the air around her shivered.

"No!" Wesley started up from the couch. Faith grabbed his shoulders and forced him down while across the room, Spike did the same for Angel.

When the lightning cleared, where once had been one woman, there were suddenly two. Two thin and angular women, one wearing an ankle-length suede skirt, the other with electric blue streaks in her hair and tinting her form-fitting mahogany body armor.

The latter brought her fist to her heart in a salute. "Lady," she breathed.

The former stared at the sofa, her eyes wide and fragile and broken. "Wesley?" she croaked.

"Cue romantic reunions, heartfelt confessions . . ." Faith muttered to Angel, turning her back on the newly-reunited lovers. "Do you got a light?" she asked, intentionally ignoring the wonder and concern in his eyes. "I'd murder for a smoke."

"I - " Like Wesley and Fred and even Spike, Angel was again speechless.

Shaking her head, the Slayer cut him some slack. "Never mind."

She moved past the vampire towards the large window against the far wall that led out onto the fire escape. On her way, Faith stopped by the bookshelf to pull a small oriental vase out from among the grimoires. Flipping the vase upside down, she shook it until a pack of Marlboro Gold and a disposable lighter dropped into her hand.

Ha! Faith had guessed that they would never clear things out without her. G-d, she had missed this flat.

"Don't you want to discuss your grand plan first?" Amara's amused voice followed the Slayer as she drew back the shutters and raised open the sill.

"In a minute," Faith called back. "Let the lovebirds make with the smooching. I need me some sweet, sweet nicotine."

"You're really here?" Fred was saying to Wesley in a very soft, gentle voice.

"Yes, I'm really here," he assured her.

"What - how?" Her voice and her hands were shaking.

Amara watched them. She had not spent this much concentrated time in the company of humans and humanoids since she had been a girl. There was a current of frisson in the air, as though everyone was curious to see what might happen next. She was aware that everyone apart from Illyria, and perhaps Faith, remained acutely uncomfortable with her presence. Amara found that very entertaining.

But there was something more. A sense of a group understanding between the humans, vampires, and former demon-king who remained in the living room, an understanding that did not include Amara. It made her feel the barest taste of something like discomfort. She wondered if perhaps she should join the Slayer out on the fire escape so that everyone else could share in a group hug.

After a moment of contemplation, she did just that. Clambering over the sill, she pulled the hem of her black dress through before closing the window.

"Treasurer," she greeted the Slayer, who had already lit her cigarette and was perched on the fire escape, her arms wrapped through the steel railing, staring at the night sky. The street below was not empty, but it was close.

The woman did not turn. "Co-president," she acknowledged, then took a long drag on her cigarette.

Amara joined her on the step. There was not technically enough room, but such a little thing would not stand in her way. "May I?" She extended her hand for the cigarette.

Reluctantly scooting over, Faith raised her eyebrows. "You sure you want to?" she said mildly. "It's kind of a nasty habit. I had thought I quit," she reflected to herself.

"I am well acquainted with nasty. As you'll recall, I spent much of my early childhood with Crowley." The sister of God plucked the cigarette out of the Slayer's hand.

"And yet you don't have an accent. Miraculous." Faith looked back over London at night. Mentally, she added cigarettes and this view to the ongoing list of things that she had forgotten to miss. Barely fifteen minutes' alive, and already the afterlife was fading to some two-dimensional sepia-toned memory in the back of her head. With each breath of nicotine, the exhaustion and anger that flavored the memory faded just a little bit more.

Amara inhaled, winced, then coughed. She was not sure what she had been expecting, but it had not been _this_. "Eugh. You were right. That is . . . unpleasant."

"Not the best thing humans have invented, maybe. But still not the worst."

"What do you think is the worst?"

Faith laughed humorlessly. "I don't think we know each other well enough yet to have that conversation."

"We will," mused the sister of God. She returned the cigarette. "In time."

The hair on the back of the Slayer's neck stood on end, but she stubbornly refused to shiver. "The point of smoking out on the fire escape," Faith announced, stubbing out the end of her fag on the steel railing, "is to be alone."

She rose to her feet and dropped the dog-end into an empty clay flower pot beside the window. "Come on, then. Better get the big pow-wow over with before Wesley gets his tongue permanently stuck to Fred's tonsils."

* * *

There ought to have been battle lines drawn in the living room, Amara reflected, and she was surprised that there were none. The man she had also sprang from Heaven - Pryce, was it? - was seated on the sofa in between her vassal Illyria and Illyria's former vessel. After a brief scuffle, the Slayer Lehane and the vampire with the obvious dye-job had both squished into a leather recliner that matched the sofa. The other vampire, the serious-looking one that even Amara could recognize as _handsome_ if squarely-built, had taken the wingback armchair.

It left Amara standing in front of the television while humans, vampires, and an ancient demon stared up at her, with fear, loyalty, and amusement written upon their faces. She regarded them, this motley crew of creatures that the Slayer had insisted were integral to her plan. And Illyria, the only one of her lieutenants to have escaped the Deeper Well. Illyria, whose vendetta against the snobby specimens called archangels had only been rivaled by Amara's vendetta against the Creator himself.

To her mild surprise, it was the mousy woman who spoke first. "What exactly is going on here?" asked the creature, the one Faith referred to as Fred. "Why are you helping us?"

The blond vampire - _Spike_? - co-sharing the recliner raised his hand. "Question seconded."

"Faith can answer that."

The Vampire Slayer shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Admittedly, this was at least in part because Spike had just successfully lodged an elbow in her ribs and shoved her up onto the arm of the recliner.

"Here's the deal, folks." She gave the vampire a rightfully deserved revenge-shove. "Dean volunteered for angel condom duty - shut _up_, Spike - and turns out the prick of an archangel broke the rules of their agreement. Which he should have known would happen," she muttered under her breath.

"We know all this," Illyria interrupted her, sounding bored. "Your apprentices and the younger Winchester made several very anxious calls earlier this evening. They wanted to enlist my help in tracking this new Michael."

Faith raised her eyebrows. This was all news to her. "And?" she prompted.

"And I told them I would try. I had little confidence in their efforts. But now . . ." Blue flames sprouted from the former god-king's hands, and Wesley flinched. Illyria smirked. "But now, with my lady returned," she nodded to Amara, "and my powers completely restored - "

Angel, Spike, and Fred all leapt to their feet, shouting over one another.

"You restored her powers?!" Angel half-asked, half-yelled at Amara.

"_All _of them?" Fred's hands were in fists.

"Complete as in _complete_?" Spike had gone deathly pale, more so than his usual corpse pallor.

Illyria clapped her hands, and the room froze. Time stopped for everyone except for the ancient demon, her lady, and Faith.

"I do not have the patience for this," she warned through narrowed eyes. "And I have no intention of listening to the same feeble protests I have heard a thousand times over. This is _your_ doing," she said knowledgeably at Faith. "Isn't it?"

"It was my power that freed you," Amara pointed out calmly.

Illyria bowed. "And for that, I thank you. But I do not think you would have chosen to involve yourself quite so personally in such a mundane affair had not someone else sought your involvement." She looked back to the Slayer. "You should be dead."

"Thank you, Captain Obvious," Faith shot back. "I already did time in prison when I was alive the first time. Didn't need to spend eternity repeating the experience. Something you'd know about, considering the Well."

The ancient demon tipped her head in acknowledgement. "I will not ask to be privy to the details of your dealings with this mortal," she addressed Amara. "And I thank you for my freedom. I suppose it comes with strings?" She grit her teeth.

"Only the one. You are correct that this . . ."

"Faith," the Slayer supplied helpfully.

"That Faith did request my assistance."

Illyria sighed. "It's the Michael sword, isn't it? Always and ever, it is the Michael sword. That's the reason and the string, all in one. You seek to enlist my full assistance in separating archangel and vessel."

"Yes," Faith answered for her when Amara remained silent.

"You see," Amara addressed the ceiling, "I cannot ask you to do anything that might go against my brother's plans. He and I remain on something of good terms, and I should like that state of affairs to continue. And so I cannot ask you to bring fire and wrath and blood down on his archangels - regardless of which of the many universes he created them in. _I_ could never ask for something like that.

"But," she went on, still resolutely talking to a tiny crack in the plaster, "if I had . . . say . . . another servant who rebelled . . . and that servant falsely represented her own seditious plans as my wishes and led other servants into insurrection."

"I understand." Illyria began to smile. She could appreciate underhandedness. The former god-king gave the Slayer a brief once-over, her eyes fixing on the silver symbol still glowing on her forehead. "And how, exactly, might I know the identity of my fellow servants?"

Amara looked away from the ceiling just long enough to track Illyria's gaze. "Oh, it is simple. They will have my mark writ upon their faces. Of course," she continued pensively, "it wouldn't do for them to have my mark so clearly visible forever."

She walked across the carpet to the recliner, leaning around a frozen Spike to kiss the Slayer gently on the forehead. The silver mark gradually began to fade.

"This is all I can do," she said more seriously. "Any more would risk bringing my brother into this. And that, I believe, none of us desire."

"Am I allowed to punch him?" asked Faith, unable to help herself.

"He would likely destroy you."

"Yeah, better to just keep this on the DL, then."

"One last thing," added Amara. "When you locate this Michael, if you require further assistance beyond what Illyria can do, then and only then, the two of you in conjunction may summon me. Otherwise . . . " she let her voice trail away.

"Otherwise what?"

Amara smiled nastily. "Otherwise, I may not answer."

In a cloud of inky smoke, the sister of God disappeared.

"You have no idea what you are doing," Illyria said bluntly as the smoke slowly dissipated.

"I've got enough of one," Faith retorted. "Find Michael, kick him in the nuts, get Dean, move on. That's my plan."

"Thin strokes leaving room for improvisation?" hazarded the Old One.

"Always." The Slayer grinned. "You do know my style. So, can I rely on you for help with this, Bluebird?"

"Sometimes, I quite detest that name."

"Well, you've frozen all our friends, so you don't exactly get your pick of nicknames right now."

Illyria complained, "They are not _my_ friends. I am not -" She exhaled in frustration. "I am a _god_," she protested. "I have been here since before this earth was created. I watched the first amoeba eat its neighbor. I was _worshipped_ once. And now with my powers returned . . . " She flexed her palms and the blue flames scorched up to the ceiling.

"Watch the paint," warned Faith.

"I will be _worshipped _again," Illyria concluded.

"Not by us," the Slayer pointed out. "Look, Illyria, we're allies in this. Can you at least accept that?"

The Old One's eyes flashed. "Allies, yes. Friends, never. I will help you, because Amara has asked it and because I missed my opportunity to wreak my vengeance on the Michael who conspired to imprison me in the Deeper Well. I shall happily bring destruction down onto his . . . "

"Doppelgänger?"

"Close enough. If you should need to contact me . . ." Illyria sighed. "If you should need to reach me, I shall take the Burkle's cell phone. Try not to call unless it's an emergency."

"Thanks, Blue. I do really appreciate."

"Do not call me that," Illyria reminded her, but her voice had softened. "I suppose I must return you to the natural flow of time."

"That would be good."

"Mmm." Illyria clapped her hands a second time, and the world restarted.

Faith put her hands over her ears to drown out the cacophony that was Spike and Angel and Fred all yelling over one another until Wesley bellowed to quiet them.

"Silence!" hollered the Englishman.

Shockingly, for once they listened.

"That's enough," Wesley continued. "Now where did they go?"

For neither Amara nor Illyria were anywhere to be seen.


End file.
